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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 



POEMS OF WORDSWORTH 
SHELLEY AND KEATS 






SELECTED 

FROM "THE GOLDEN TREASURY" OF 

FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE 







Edited for the Use of Schools 

BY 

W.'rn^RENT AND JOHN ERSKINE 

PROFESSORS IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 




GINN AND COMPANY 

BOSTON • NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LONDON 



tR/ 






COPYRIGHT, 1912, 1914, BY 
W. P. TRENT AND JOHN ERSKINE 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
914.1 



JAN 30 1914 



Cfte jatftcnaum ^rcgg 

GINN AND COMPANY • PRO- 
PRIETORS ■ BOSTON • U.S.A. 

©CI.A361787 



EDITORIAL NOTE 



This edition of those poems of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats 
selected by Palgrave for his " Golden Treasury " is intended to meet 
the requirements recently adopted for high-school students. We have 
tried to let the poems speak for themselves, adding only such notes 
of information as seem needed in a book designed for study rather 
than for more or less rapid reading. For the most part we have 
avoided aesthetic criticism ; where all is so excellent, the reader 
cannot go wrong if he makes his own choices and discoveries. In 
preparing the notes, we have consulted the available annotations, 
and wish to acknowledge much serviceable guidance, especially from 
the elaborate commentary by Mr. J. H. Fowler and Mr. W. Bell, 
published by The Macmillan Company, and from the edition by 
Mr. Herbert Bates, published by Longmans, Green & Co. In the 
omission of most metrical and etymological matters, we have wished 
to make clear to teachers and students what seem to us the more 
important steps in the approach to poetry. 

W. P. T. 

J.E. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

LYRICAL POETRY ix 

THE AUTHORS 

Wordsworth xviii 

Shelley xxv 

Keats xxix 

THE EDITOR xxxiii 

SELECTED POEMS OF \VORDS\VORTII 

She was a Phantom of delight i 

She dweh among the untrodden ways 2 

I traveled among unknown men 2 

Three years she grew 3 

A slumber did my spirit seal 4 

Lucy Gray, or Solitude 4 

Why art thou silent ! 6 

Surprised by joy 7 

Ode to Duty 7 

Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland .... 9 

On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic 10 

Written in London, September, 1802 10 

London, 1802 11 

When I have borne in memory 11 

Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman 12 

The Small Celandine 15 

The Affliction of Margaret 16 

To a Skylark 18 

The Green Linnet 19 

To the Cuckoo 20 

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 ... 21 

V 



vi SELECTED POEMS 

PAGE 

Composed at Neidpath Castle 22 

Admonition 23 

To a Highland Girl at Inversneyde 23 

The Solitary Reaper 26 

The Reverie of Poor Susan 27 

I wander'd lonely as a cloud 27 

To the Daisy 28 

Yarrow Unvisited 30 

Yarrow Visited, September, 181 4 32 

It is a beauteous evening 34 

To Sleep 35 

Most sweet it is 35 

Lines written in Early Spring 36 

Ruth 37 

Elegiac Stanzas 45 

Glen-Almain, or the Narrow Glen 47 

The World is too much with us 48 

Inside of King's College Chapel, Cambridge 48 

The Two April Mornings 49 

The Fountain 51 

The Trosachs 53 

My heart leaps up 54 

Ode, Intimations of Immortality 54 

SELECTED POEMS OF SHELLEY 

The Indian Serenade 61 

I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden 62 

Love's Philosophy 62 

To Night 63 

When the Igimp is shatter'd 64 

One word is too often profaned 65 

Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples 65 

To a Skylark 66 

Ozymandias 70 

With a Guitar : to Jane 70 

To Jane : the Invitation 73 

The Recollection 75 

To the Moon , n 



CONTENTS vii 

PAGE 

The Question 77 

Lines written among the Euganean Hills 79 

Ode to the West Wind 84 

On a Poet's lips 86 

A Dirge 87 

A Lament 87 

Music, when soft voices die 88 

SELECTED POEMS OF KEATS 

Ode 89 

On first looking into Chapman's Homer 90 

In a drear-nighted December 91 

La Belle Dame sans Merci 91 

Bright Star ! 93 

When I have fears 94 

Lines on the Mermaid Tavern » 94 

Ode to a Nightingale 95 

To one who has been long in city pent 97 

To Autumn 98 

Fancy 99 

Ode on a Grecian Urn 102 

The Human Seasons 103 



NOTES 



105 



LYRICAL POETRY 

I 

Of all literary types the lyric is perhaps the easiest to recognize and 
the hardest to define. If we say that the lyric is a song, — a poem 
which is written to be sung or which sounds as if it might be sung, — 
we should have to include under our definition the Old English or 
Scotch ballad, which has the suggestion of song, but which is narra- 
tive and belongs rather to the type of the short story. Palgrave chose 
for his anthology, the " Golden Treasury," those poems which turned 
upon a single thought, feeling, or situation. Yet this formula did not 
represent his notion of the lyric ; for he adds that he excluded narra- 
tive, descriptive, and didactic poems, "unless accompanied by rapidity 
of movement, brevity, and the coloring of human passion." The heart 
of his definition really lay in the last modest phrase, " the coloring of 
human passion." 

For the lyric is essentially that literary type which expresses emo- 
tion, just as the drama and the novel express active experience, and 
the essay expresses thought. In his study of " The School of Gior- 
gione' Walter Pater said that all art tends to become music — that 
is, to stir emotions rather than to state intellectual ideas. A musician 
is annoyed when some one asks what the music " means " ; to him 
it is a feeling, not a statement; it means no more than does the taste 
of sugar. So the painter is annoyed at the common attempt to read 
a story into a picture ; to him the picture is a scheme of color and 
an arrangement of lines, — a sensation for the eye, as music is for 
the ear. But the average man looks for an idea, — especially in the 
United States, where " intellect " has unfortunately been rated higher 
than the gift and training to appreciate beauty ; and in all art we see 
a certain struggle between the artist's desire to set out the loveliness 
of the world for man's enjoyment, and man's contrary desire that art 
shall say something that can be translated into words. 



X SELECTED POEMS 

Pater, in his famous saying, meant that the best of art cannot be 
translated into words. When we hear a cello or violin, the tragic 
tones give us a luxurious sadness, although we have no reason to be 
sad, and cannot tell another man what the tone of the cello is like. 
The hurdy-gurdy in the street playing a dance tune sets the children 
to waltzing, and the drums and fifes of the military band make us 
feel like marching. These different emotions, we notice, can be indi- 
cated only by mentioning the instruments that stimulate them ; if the 
reader has experienced the emotions, he will understand the reference 
— otherwise it will mean nothing to him. So the lyric, nearest of all 
literary types to music, says to us many delicious things — recogniz- 
able but inexpressible emotions — which are over and above what 
the actual words mean. 

The chief language, so to speak, which the lyric employs in addi- 
tion to actual words is rhythm. Whether the beat of the lines is 
strong or weak, grave or merry ; whether the measure befits a song 
or a dance tune or a military march — we feel all this before we even 
attend to the intellectual message of the verse. The rhythm, the 
physical habit of the lyric, denotes the vital energy of its emotion. 
Poems with a strongly marked rhythm, like Shelley's " One word is 
too often profaned " (p. 65), suggest and stimulate a well-defined state 
of feeling wherein the emotion easily dominates — as in the lyric it 
should — the intellectual content. Such a poem, however, as Words- 
worth's lines on a picture of Peele Castle (p. 45) indicates at once by 
its less definite rhythm that its emotional energy is relaxed and unim- 
portant, almost secondary to the thoughts that make it a poem of in- 
tellect rather than of feeling. And in the fixed forms, like the sonnet, 
where the rhythm and the number of syllables and lines are prescribed, 
a reader of even slight experience detects differences of rhythmic en- 
ergy between Keats's ** The Human Seasons" (p. 103) and Words- 
worth's '' The World is too much with us " (p. 48). 

Within the single poem the rhythm may alter if it parallels some 
emotional change. Obviously such alterations occur most often in 
long poems. With Dryden and the other essentially classical poets 
the change of rhythm is formal and for a set purpose ; the lyrics of 
this school therefore divide into sections, which vaguely resemble the 



LYRICAL POETRY xi 

movements of a sonata or symphony. In the romantic practice of 
Shelley, however, the changes are more subtle and seldom prepared 
for ; the rhythm is more sensitive to veering moods, and accommo- 
dates itself to its subject as modern music does, measure by measure, 
instead of prescribing the form its subject shall take. Line i6 of 
Shelley's verses " Written among the Euganean Hills " must, for ex- 
ample, be read by itself, not in the rhythm of the preceding lines : 

The tempest fleet 

Hurries on with lightning feet, 

Riving sail, and cord, and plank, 

Till the ship has almost drank 

Death from the o'er-brimming deep ; 
/ / / / / 

And sinks down, down, like that sleep 

When the dreamer seems to be 

Weltering through eternity. 

Next after rhythm, time — - the tempo of music — is the vehicle of 
lyric expression. It is an error to think of all verse or of all the Hnes 
in one poem as measured by fixed time beats. Wordsworth's '' The 
Education of Nature " (p. 3) is full of musical rallentandos. The 
length of the syllable or the use of rests concerns the time of verse 
as vitally as the length of notes and rests concerns the tempo of music ; 
without intelligence in these elementary divisions neither music nor 
verse can be read. Usually one can guess at the length of a syllable 
from its rhythmic or intellectual emphasis. The meaning of each Hne 
of Shelley's " Dirge " (p. d>y) demands an accent on the first word : 

Rough wind, that moanest loud 



Grief too sad for 



song: 



/ / / / 

Wild wind, when sullen cloud 
/ / / 

Knells all the night long ; 
/ / / / 

Sad storm whose tears are vain, 
/ / / / 

Bare woods whose branches stain, 

/ / / / 

Deep caves and dreary main, — 

Wail for the world's wrong. 



xii SELECTED POEMS 

The third vehicle of lyric expression is tone, or what we often call 
in a loose way " musical quality." The same note played upon the 
piano and the flute and the violin has in each case a different appeal, 
which lies in the tone quality of the instrument. The melody would 
probably seem most appealing, most emotional, when played upon 
the violin, because that instrument has the most emotional tone. So 
the thought of a lyric stirs us to a greater degree when the very 
sound of the words is stirring. This word-music depends upon the 
combination of vowels and consonants ; the liquid consonants /, m^ 
n, ?-, produce the most obvious effect of smoothness, as we see in 
many a haunting quotation : 

That last infirmity of noble mind. 

He nothing common did or mean 
Upon that memorable scene. 

From Harmony, from heavenly Harmony 
This universal frame began. 

The tone quality of a lyric is hard for some people to appreciate when 
the intellectual content of the poem is slight. Their problem is then 
much as if they were listening to pure music and trying to discover 
its "meaning." Shelley's "Lament" (p. %']) says very little intel- 
lectually ; rhythmically, too, it is extremely simple, but the tone that 
distinguishes it is one of haunting sorrow. 

Because word rhythm and word melody are conveniently described 
in terms of music, some confusion is likely to result as to the relation 
between music and verse. The two arts, for practical purposes, are 
distinct, and cannot be confused without some loss to each or either. 
The fact that the lyric in Elizabeth's time was rich in melody and 
rhythm cannot be explained by the public ability at the time to play 
the lute, or by the educated gentleman's ability to sing a part in a 
madrigal, any more than the frequent harshness of Browning's verse 
could be cited as proof that he was not an accomplished musician. 
We know, of course, that his skill in music was great; and that Tenny- 
son, who excelled him in verse melody, knew nothing of music ; and 
that Edward Fitzgerald, who translated Omar into liquid verse, was a 



LYRICAL POETRY xiii 

musician. So all combinations of knowledge and ignorance in the two 
arts are possible, and there is no necessary relation. The speaking 
voice, for which poetry is composed, is essentially an instrument of 
percussion, like the piano, and its words must be uttered with a cer- 
tain speed before they make their effect. Song or ordinary music is 
prolonged sound and tends to need an instrument of sustained tone, 
like the singing voice or the organ. The old ballads were sung to 
tunes which now are forgotten, because the words were much more 
important. Yet the words show in certain rhythmic peculiarities that 
they were fitted to musical exigencies, as is the case with most of 
Shakespeare's songs. Had the words made no stronger appeal than 
the notes, they would not have found their way into this or any 
other anthology, but would have been preserved, if at all, as inci- 
dental to the music. 

What music once accompanied the lyric is of little consequence to 
the young student. Of much greater importance is his ability to feel 
in the poem the expression of more than the words, — that approxi- 
mation to the condition of music which is found in the rhythm, the 
time, and the tone. Oral readers of poetry may usually be classified 
according as they value the intellectual content of the verse, reducing 
it to prose, or the melody of it, turning it often into a chant. It is 
said that the great poets monotoned their lines in what might seem to 
be a singsong ; so Tennyson, in particular, read. Whatever our taste 
in that matter, we should retain our grip on the one important truth 
that the lyric, above all other literature, is emotional ; and we are not 
reading it wisely if it does not reach our emotions before it reaches 
our brain. 

II 

When a lyric is composed the process in the poet's mind is perhaps 
something like this : an emotion is aroused in him by some stimulus ; 
that emotion possesses him until it begins to take a definite rhythm 
in his mind, as the photographic film is developed and takes form in 
the chemical bath ; when the rhythm is unmistakable to his inner 
ear, the poet writes his lyric. To him the terms in the process are 
stimulus, emotion, and rhythm. To the reader, however, the poem 



XIV SELECTED POEMS 

must present itself in a different order. He perceives the rhythm first, 
and by the rhythm he is prepared for the emotion that produced it ; 
by a solemn rhythm he is prepared for a solemn emotion ; by a joy- 
ous rhythm he is prepared for joy. If the emotion is to be altogether 
intelligible, the reader must come at once upon some explanation of 
the stimulus ; otherwise he cannot appropriate to himself imagina- 
tively the poet's experience. Therefore the stimulus, in the average 
lyric, must be the second thing that the reader or hearer perceives. 
After the emotion has been felt and explained the lyric is occupied 
with developing it. 

In the average successful lyric the stimulus is made clear in the 
opening hnes. In Wordsworth's " To a Highland Girl " (p. 23) the 
scene that inspires the poem is described at once. In Shelley's " To the 
Moon " (p. 'J']) the paleness of the moon is implied at once. In Keats's 
" La belle dame sans merci" (p. 91) the knight is portrayed in the 
opening questions. The stimulus may be found in any human experi- 
ence, — in nature, as in Shelley's ^' Ode to the West Wind " (p. 84) ; 
or in art, as in Keats's " Ode on a Grecian Urn" (p. 102). In both 
cases the reader is aware of the cause of the emotion in the poet, and 
it becomes the cause of emotion also in himself; it makes concrete 
and rational what would otherwise be only a vague atmosphere of 
feeling created by the rhythm. 

The experience of an emotion, however, has sometimes other 
phenomena, which to the poet seem more important even than its 
stimulus. For example, he may find some aspect of nature in remark- 
able sympathy with an habitual emotional state of his, and that sym- 
pathy may appear to him of vastly more importance than the original 
cause of his mood. To express his mood he may then depend upon 
the rhythm and the context of the poem ; he perhaps will not try 
to explain it. In the ''Ode to a Nightingale" (p. 95) Keats tells 
us that he is extremely unhappy, and that the nightingale singing 
near by seems to be the very voice of his soul. The intention of 
the poem is to make us feel Keats's recognition of his own mood 
and aspirations in the nightingale. We know from other sources 
that the sorrow which beset him at the moment was the death of 
a favorite brother, but that fact is not important to the poem, 



LYRICAL POETRY xv 

and is therefore omitted. In the poem on the daffodils (p. 27) Words- 
worth's mood, before the flowers have gladdened him, is peculiarly 
empty. He was walking alone, we are told, but whether he was 
sad or gay or just absent-minded, we are not told ; it is not neces- 
sary to the poem. 

Important as the stimulus is in the inward structure of the lyric, 
the development of the emotion is usually, of course, the chief object 
of the poem. Any emotion is short-lived ; it subsides gradually until 
the mind is reestablished in a state of normal calm. Therefore the 
record of the development of emotion in the lyric must be brief, and 
it concerns itself with the reestablishment of the intellect over the 
feelings. As the lyric progresses, the emotion is likely to run thin, 
and unless the poet has the taste to stop in time, the end of his song 
will be didactic or moralizing or narrative, — anything but lyrical. 
Our habitual ways of thought are matters of convention ; we think 
correctly on the great subjects ; therefore our cold-blooded pro- 
nouncements on those subjects differ from age to age, as the fashions 
change, and those cold-blooded conventions make their appearance 
at the end of the lyrics. In the least controlled part of the emotional 
experience, the immediate reaction to the stimulus, the poet reveals 
most of himself ; yet, strange as it may seem, the lyric in that 
personal revelation changes least from century to century, from 
land to land; for men are of one blood in their genuine feelings, 
and they are estranged chiefly by artificial habits of thought. The 
sonnets of Shakespeare and the love songs of Burns have often 
the same stimulus, and where either speaks his true emotion he is 
contemporary to the other; they differ in the use to which they 
put their emotions and in the way in which their natures recover 
their normal state. 

The best illustration of this analysis of the lyric can be found in 
the funeral poem or elegy, which, from the lament of Moschus over 
Bion, has had a traditional career in the poetry of Europe and a very 
brilliant career in English poetry. This type of lyric, expressing 
grief for a dead friend, begins with a statement of the cause of the 
sorrow, — the stimulus of the emotion. As the grief subsides, those 
questions suggest themselves which are common to all human loss. 



xvi SELECTED POEMS 

— Why was this man taken and another left? or, Why should we 
strive for our ideals, if the accidents of life so cruelly defeat us? In 
the third section of the elegy the poet's habitual reason is again in 
control of his emotion, and he comforts himself in the conventions 
of his time and country. The first and second portions of the elegy 
in English are, for all the famous illustrations, practically the same ; 
" Lycidas," in the opinion of many competent critics, is the noblest 
example of the English type. The third section, giving the consola- 
tion, is very individual in each elegy. Milton has hope of Christian 
immortality ; Shelley, in " Adonais," has a glimpse of the immortality 
of beauty ; Tennyson, in " In Memoriam," comforts himself with the 
general promise of evolution; Arnold, in '' Thyrsis," turns to the 
prospect of a heroic culture. These resemblances and differences are 
as true of other kinds of lyric as of the elegy. 

We could put the matter in a slightly different way by saying that 
the possible stimuli of the lyric are very few ; there are few primary 
emotions, and few occasions in any one man's life when his feelings 
are deeply stirred. Therefore the originality of the lyric is to be 
sought not in the stimulus but in the character of the poet upon whom 
the stimulus acts. It has been the fashion of recent decades to empha- 
size the subjective, personal note in the definition of the lyric, and at 
least so much truth is in the convention as is here indicated ; the 
difficulty with the point of view is that to-day many other kinds of 
literature besides the lyric are subjective. 

An emotion, a mere feeling, is the most fleeting of human experi- 
ences, no matter how permanent its effect. The lyric poets instinc- 
tively try to give their emotions a kind of immortality in the close of 
the song. Their methods are infinite in variety ; it is important only 
to be aware of the attempt and to match the instinct in our own feel- 
ings. In his poem " To a Highland Girl " (p. 23) Wordsworth 
ends with the imperishable landscape picture which is his memory of 
the incident ; in '' The Solitary Reaper " (p. 26) he bears a song in 
his heart just as imperishably ; Burns creates a similar immortality 
for his " Highland Mary," and Keats in his great odes closes upon 
a general truth or a state of mind which jusdy immortalizes our ex- 
perience of the poem. It is this passion of all artists — and especially 



LYRICAL POETRY xvii 

of the lyric poets — to make permanent a beauty that is learned only 
in its vanishing, which Shelley expresses in the little song — 

Music, when soft voices die, 
Vibrates in the memory — 
Odors, when sweet violets sicken. 
Live within the sense they quicken. 

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, 
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed ; 
And so thy thoughts, when Thou art gone, 
Love itself shall slumber on. 



THE AUTHORS 

WORDSWORTH 

I 

William Wordsworth is remembered as a poet, as a critic, and as 
a man. He was a poet of nature. He loved mountains and rivers, 
flowers and trees — the humble as well as the grand aspects of the 
world about us, and he had the genius to show us these aspects as 
they are ; when we know and love his poetry, we find that we have 
better eyes for nature and are more sensitive to all beauty out of doors. 
Wordsworth also believed that nature is a great teacher — of moral 
truth, of the sense of right and wrong, of the love of virtue. He 
thought that men who daily look upon majestic mountains, and walk 
beneath graceful trees, and hear the brook or the waterfall, are more 
likely to be noble, graceful, and harmonious in character than men 
who all their lives have been shut up in cities. 

We should expect a poet who held this belief to be simple in his 
tastes, and Wordsworth's fame as a critic rests upon his theory that 
well-chosen, simple, common words are best for poetry. The eight- 
eenth century, from Alexander Pope to Thomas Gray, had written 
verse in what was called poetic diction ; that is, in words selected for 
unusual refinement or dignity, qualities supposed to be more suitable 
to verse than to prose. Wordsworth reminded us that the difference 
between poetry and any other kind of writing or speaking lies, not in 
the words, but in our use of them. If what we write or say is noble 
in thought, strong in feeling, and touched with that glamor which we 
call imagination, we shall produce poetry ; and no further choice of 
words is needed beyond the care that well-bred people usually take 
— to say what they mean and to avoid vulgarity. 

It was not Wordsworth's language, however, so much as his life, 
which showed his love of simplicity. Many who might not otherwise 



THE AUTHORS xix 

care for poetry visit the little Dove Cottage in Grasmere as though 
it were a shrine ; for there he and his sister spent their happiest days 
in " plain living and high thinking," as he called it. Only when we 
have read the account of that life in his sister's journal or in the family 
letters, do we realize how resolute he was in avoiding all ordinary 
distractions of society, to keep himself free for his poetry. This in- 
dependence won him honor as a man. 

For some readers, however, the most inspiring account of his Hfe is 
to be found not in the family diaries or letters, but in his long poem, 
" The Prelude," which tells us of the growth of his poetic ideas. In 
his childhood and boyhood among the Cumberland hills nature cast 
her spell upon him, he says, though at the time he hardly knew why 
the mountain shadows and the stillness of the forest were so awe- 
inspiring. At Cambridge University he came under the influence of 
great books and of great minds, and — what later was very important 
to him — in the flat country he began to appreciate the grandeur of 
the northern landscape of his youth. A summer vacation in the Alps 
increased his passion for magnificent scenes. We turn for a moment 
to the family letters, where his sister wrote of him about this time, 
" He is never so happy as when in a beautiful country." 

" The Prelude " then goes on to tell us how the love of nature led 
Wordsworth to a greater love for man. After graduation from college 
he spent a short time in London, delighting in the new ideas of liberty 
and human perfection which were then radiating from France. They 
called him a radical at the time, but his radicalism would now seem 
mild. It consisted of exchanging dreams with other generous-hearted 
young enthusiasts who thought that the final regeneration of society 
was at hand. In his own words, 

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven. 

Of course he would not be content to watch at a distance the making 
of this new day. He went to France, spent an exciting year in Orleans, 
Blois, and Paris, and finally ran some risk of his life. At the approach 
of the Terror his relatives got him safely back to England, where 
during the next few years he suffered the great disappointment of 



XX SELECTED POEMS 

his life, as the prospect of human liberty ended in the horrors of the 
guillotine and — almost as bad — in the Napoleonic tyranny. 

From this disappointment he turned again for comfort to nature. 
His sister Dorothy, whom he had seen but little for years, now kept 
house for him for a short time in the south of England, where they 
made the acquaintance of Coleridge. Then, after four months in Ger- 
many, they returned to their native mountains and settled in Gras- 
mere, Westmoreland, to live the simple poetic life which we now call 
Wordsworthian. 

All this we may learn from " The Prelude," and we need no further 
information for introduction to Wordsworth's poems. The important 
epochs in his biography were his childhood in the mountains, his revo- 
lutionary fervor and disappointment, and — immediately following that 
crisis — the companionship of his sister' Dorothy and of Coleridge. 
They were the two beings, he said later, to whom his intellect was 
most indebted. Dorothy had probably a better understanding of nature 
than he had, and Coleridge had a better understanding of poetry. He 
learned immensely from both, and was proud to acknowledge the debt. 

"The Prelude " stops when Wordsworth had still nearly fifty years 
ahead of him, but no more such profound awakenings. We could 
enjoy his poetry though we knew nothing else about him, but for the 
sake of general information it will be well to review briefly his whole 
life. He was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, on April 7, 1770, 
and spent his childhood there with his brothers and his sister Dorothy. 
On the death of their parents the children were separated, to be cared 
for by charitable relatives. The poet was sent to St. John's College, 
Cambridge, by two uncles, who later sent Christopher, a younger 
brother, to Trinity College in the same university. From November, 
1 791, to the following October, William Wordsworth was in France, 
as we have seen ; on his return he spent some years writing and vainly 
trying to find profitable occupation. In 1 794 a small legacy, the gen- 
erous bequest of a young man who believed in his poetic ability, made 
it possible for him and his sister to begin their famous housekeeping 
at Racedown, Dorsetshire. There in June, 1797, they met Coleridge 
and promptly removed to Alfoxden, near Nether Stowey, Somerset- 
shire, where Coleridge then lived. In 1798 the two poets brought 



THE AUTHORS xxi 

out their momentous little book, the " Lyrical Ballads," containing 
Wordsworth's first statement of his theory of diction and some of 
his most beautiful poems. All three friends then went to Germany 
together, but the Wordsworths soon returned and settled in Dove 
Cottage, Grasmere. When Coleridge got back he took a house in 
Keswick, in the same county, and there soon came also Coleridge's 
brother-in-law, Southey. From the region they lived in, famous for 
its lakes, the three poets were nicknamed the Lake School. 

At this point " The Prelude " stops. In 1802 Wordsworth married 
Mary Hutchinson, his cousin, who proved only less helpful and in- 
spiring than his sister. Fame came slowly to him, and the satisfac- 
tion of it was dimmed by various sorrows. Of his five children two 
died young ; his sister became an invalid ; his favorite daughter, 
Dora, died shortly after her marriage. But in his age and sorrow 
Wordsworth was as sturdy and self-contained as in his first years at 
Grasmere. His countrymen learned to respect him, and young poets 
like Tennyson revered him as a patriarch. In 1843 he succeeded 
Southey as poet laureate. On April 23, 1850, he died at Rydal 
Mount, near Ambleside, the home of his later years. 

II 

Wordsworth's theory of poetry begins in his theory of poetic dic- 
tion. Fine words do not make an idea poetic ; a poetic idea makes 
the words fine. That is briefly his doctrine, and it ought not to be 
hard to understand, but many readers do find it difficult. They will 
quote you such a hne as " Into the middle of the plank," in '' Lucy 
Gray " (p. 4), and ask if that is poetry. Quoted apart from its con- 
text, it certainly is not poetry, but if put back in its setting, it seems 
to prove Wordsworth's theory. When we read the poem consecu- 
tively, this bare, unornamented line tells us that Lucy Gray was lost, 
and the grief of her parents, which at the moment we share, makes 
us forget how plain the words are. 

Some choice Wordsworth would urge even among plain words. 
Not all plain words are of the same kind. He observed that farmers 
and shepherds use a diction more significant and vigorous than do city 
people of the lower class. Nature in its grand aspects teaches man 



xxii SELECTED POEMS 

to feel deeply, he believed ; and when man has feelings to express, 
and is under no city obligation to express them conventionally, he dis- 
covers the right way to say things and becomes the model for poets. 
To understand just how nature brings this about, we must notice 
first that the subject matter of Wordsworth's poems is usually some 
reaction to scene. He sees a mountain, or some daffodils, or a High- 
land girl reaping, or a rainbow, and he is immediately interested in 
the way he feels. We notice how often the word " feeling " occurs 
in his verse. Since the world about us constantly stimulates some 
sensation or emotion, and since our character is ultimately the result 
of all our feelings, it seemed to him of the utmost importance to be- 
gin by cultivating our sensitiveness. In a poem called " Expostulation 
and Reply," a friend asks him why he spends his time dreaming in 
the sunshine, instead of studying some wise books. The poet replies, 

" The eye — it cannot choose but see ; 
We cannot bid the ear be still ; 
Our bodies feel, where'er they be, 
Against or with our will. 

" Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
That we can feed this mind of ours 
In a wise passiveness. 

" Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 
Of things for ever speaking, 
That nothing of itself will come, 
But we must still be seeking ? " 

When we have cultivated sensitiveness to all the voices of nature, 
we must next attend to the kind of feelings we have, for it may be 
that we are influenced by aspects of nature which happen to be bad 
for us. The contrast is made by the poem beginning " Three years 
she grew in sun and shower " (p. 3) and by " Ruth " (p. 37). In the 
first we read that nature became for this lovely child both law and 
impulse — that is, to reverse the order, both vitality and restraint ; 
that nature gave her the calm, beautiful dignity of rocks and hills ; 
that the modons of the clouds taught her grace ; that the stars made 
her thoughtful ; that the music of the brooks actually made her face 



THE AUTHORS xxiii 

lovely to look at — for the noble look that music often brings upon 
the face of a listener became habitual with her. All this illustrates 
the happy influence of nature, where the scene acts not only to kin- 
dle the soul, but also to restrain. In " Ruth " we have the story of a 
young man, very sensitive to natural influences, who became a villain 
because the tropic world he lived in taught him no restraint, but only 
luxurious indulgence. 

The wind, the tempest roaring high, 

The tumult of a tropic sky. 

Might well be dangerous food 

For him, a youth to whom was given 

So much of earth — so much of heaven, 

And such impetuous blood. 

Whatever in those climes he found 

Irregular in sight or sound 

Did to his mind impart 

A kindred impulse, seem'd allied 

To his own powers, and justified 

The workings of his heart. 

In these illustrations nature is represented as educating a soul all 
at once, or with an unvarying influence. In his own case, however, 
Wordsworth felt that he had passed through three stages of discipline, 
sharply distinct. In his boyhood, as he tells us in the first book of 
"The Prelude," nature inspired him with a kind of awe that was 
much like fear. He found that he was afraid to do wrong in the 
sight of the great hills that seemed ready to overwhelm and punish 
him. In young manhood he outgrew this fear, as he says in the 
lines written above Tintern Abbey ; in place of fear he felt a sort of 
lover's passion for the wilder forms of nature : 

The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion ; the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colors and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite ; a feeling and a love, 
That had no need of a remoter charm. 
By thought supplied, nor any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye. 



XXIV SELECTED POEMS 

The same poem tells us that as he grew older he came to realize a 
spiritual aspect in nature ; he neither feared her, nor loved her simply 
for external beauty, but gathered from her a message for his soul : 

I have learned 
To look on nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
The still, sad music of humanity, 
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused. 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air. 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things. 

It vi^ould seem that the last stage of this development was the 
noblest ; indeed, that is what Wordsworth believed it to be. But he 
also believed that the sensitiveness of childhood, which made this 
development possible, was the most precious instrument of man's 
education. Therefore he wrote many poems describing childhood 
and its intuitiofts, and in his great '' Ode on the Intimations of 
Immortality " (p. 54), he expressed his joy at recovering through 
some chance memory the childhood point of view. 

Two other important phases of his nature poetry remain to be 
mentioned. This sensitiveness to the world about us will lead us, he 
believed, to a moral sense. The process in his own case is described 
in the " Ode to Duty " (p. 7). Duty is to nature what nature is to 
man, an impulse and a restraint ; he who rests upon nature will at 
length rest upon duty. The famous stanza next to the last, in this 
ode, states the doctrine clearly, though it is implied in almost all 
he wrote. 

Finally, Wordsworth developed a kind of method for enjoying 
nature. When he was gazing upon any scene, he consciously stored 



THE AUTHORS xxv 

away as much of it as possible, knowing that the memory of it would 
be an inspiration for later hours ; and he set far more store upon 
this memory than upon the actual sight of nature. He even thought 
that poetry should be inspired, not by nature itself, but by the mem- 
ory of it. Sensitiveness was necessary for taking in impressions, but 
the higher faculty was the ability to recall them — 

That inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude. 

Therefore many of his poems, as we have seen in the discussion of 
lyrical poetry (p. xiv), end with a triumphant promise of long memory 
— especially "To a Highland Girl "(p. 23) and "The Solitary Reaper" 
(p. 26). As a lyric poet he seeks to fix the passing emotion in a per- 
manent image, but he is also applying his method for feeding his soul 
with memories. The hnes written above Tintern Abbey once more 
give us our illustration : 

How oft — 

In darkness and amid the many shapes 

Of joyless daylight ; when the fretful stir 

Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, 

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart — 

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 

O sylvan Wye ! thou wanderer thro' the woods, 

How often has my spirit turned to thee ! 

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, 

With many recognitions dim and faint. 

And somewhat of a sad perplexity. 

The picture of the mind revives again : 

While here I stand, not only with the sense 

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts 

That in this moment there is life and food 

For future years. 

SHELLEY 

Percy Bysshe Shelley is often styled by his admirers the greatest, 
or at least, the most typical, of British lyrical poets. Partisans of other 
poets — of Herrick, or Burns, or Coleridge, for example — may be in- 
clined to demur, but few lovers of poetry will deny that Shelley is a 



xxvi SELECTED POEMS 

great poet and, despite the fact that he wrote' dramas and long narra- 
tive poems, primarily a lyrical poet. Whether we regard the character 
of his versification, even when he is using blank verse, or consider the 
sensitive, sympathetic, aspiring personality one discovers in his works 
and in his life, to say nothing of his emotional appeal to idealistic 
readers, particularly in their youth, we find him allied to those poets 
who tend to subjective and brief rather than to objective and sustained 
utterance. In other words, he belongs, as the critics truly say, to the 
large and varied class of poets denominated lyrical. Memorable though 
he be as the author of that remorseless tragedy, " The Cenci," he is 
more naturally thought of as the poet who apostrophized the skylark 
and the west wind. 

He was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in the county of Sussex, 
on August 4, 1 792, the eldest son of Mr., afterwards Sir, Timothy 
Shelley, an English country gentleman full of the prejudices of his 
class. After some private tutoring he was sent to a school, where 
his sensitive nature exposed him to cruel treatment on the part of 
bullies. This experience speedily awoke in him an indignation against 
all forms of tyranny. In 1804 he entered Eton, where he remained 
five years and, owing to his peculiar temperament, led a rather soli- 
tary and somewhat abnormal life. He developed literary tastes early 
and wrote extravagantly romantic prose and verse of very little value, 
some of which he managed to publish. 

In the spring of 18 10 he matriculated at University College, 
Oxford. Here he formed a friendship with a student, who, like him- 
self, was a radical — Thomas Jefferson Hogg. He wrote a pamphlet 
of an atheistical character and sent it to several ecclesiastical and col- 
legiate dignitaries, with the natural though regrettable result that, on 
his refusal to answer questions with regard to his unusual and appar- 
ently uncalled-for action, he was expelled. 

He left the university, feeling that he had not been fairly treated, 
and, having alienated his family, he was for some time adrift in 
London. Then he made a foolish and romantic marriage with a 
friend of one of his sisters, a Miss Harriet Westbrook, who was his 
social inferior and not mentally qualified to be his life's compan- 
ion. Both fancied themselves persecuted by their families, but, as a 



THE AUTHORS xxvii 

matter of fact,' they were rather well treated after their quixotic union. 
They received a fair allowance and traveled about, paying, for ex- 
ample, a visit to Ireland, where Shelley made a mild attempt to arouse 
the long-suffering people. On their return to England Shelley con- 
tinued to issue his premature writings, among them his rather inco- 
herent poem of free thought entitled " Queen Mab," and he gradually 
became estranged from his wife. On meeting Mary Godwin, daughter 
of the philosophic radical William Godwin and the advanced Mary 
Wollstonecraft, he fell desperately in love with her, and they eloped 
to the Continent in the summer of 1814. His first wife later com- 
mitted suicide, and while some excuse may be made for Shelley on 
account of his youth, his unfortunate rearing, and his eccentric genius, 
the whole sad affair remains an indelible blot upon his career. 

The union with Mary Godwin was a happy one, since she was a 
woman of fine mental and spiritual endowments, who loved and 
understood the man to whom she was finally married in 1816. They 
resided at first in England, where Shelley wrote his impressive but 
immature poem " Alastor," and the long romantic poem now known 
as "The Revolt of Islam." In 181 8, owing to the poor state of 
Shelley's health and to the public disfavor which his conduct and 
his writings, so far as the latter were noticed, had brought upon him, 
they went to Italy, from which country the poet never returned. In 
these new and beautiful surroundings his genius may truly be said 
to have flowered. He saw something of his friend Byron, and began 
at the latter's villa at Este the lyrical drama " Prometheus Unbound," 
which is full of melodious passages and high aspirations, although 
somewhat nebulous as a whole. The winter of 1818-1819 was spent 
at Naples and saw the writing of some lovely poems and of very 
charming letters sent home to England. Then he settled at Rome, 
where he finished " Prometheus Unbound " and labored on his 
powerful but repulsive tragedy, " The Cenci," based upon a dread- 
ful event in the history of a famous Italian family. At Rome the 
Shelleys, who had already known domestic bereavement, were cut 
to the heart by the loss of their little son William. They retired to 
Leghorn, and there Shelley wrote his " Ode to the West Wind." 
In 1820 they setded at Pisa, where they found congenial society 



xxviii SELECTED POEMS 

and where, for about two years, Shelley continued to write poems 
which showed that his genius was rapidly developing ; for example, 
" Adonais," the glorious elegy on Keats ; " Hellas," a noble lyrical 
drama; and many charming minor poems, among them "The Sensi- 
tive Plant " and the "Ode to a Skylark." This period also saw the 
writing of his eloquent prose work in " Defense of Poetry." In 1822 
he went with his family and some friends to Lerici. He left them, 
temporarily as he believed, in July, in order to welcome Leigh Hunt 
and his family to Italy, where it was planned that that somewhat un- 
stable man of letters should edit a quarterly to which Byron and 
Shelley intended to contribute. On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his 
friend Williams began their return journey in a yacht which, so far 
as is known, went down in a squall. On July 18 Shelley's body was 
washed ashore near Viareggio. It was subsequently cremated, and 
the ashes were buried near the grave of Keats in the Protestant 
cemetery at Rome. 

Despite the fact that during his short life he had written some of 
the most beautiful and noble of English poems, Shelley's reputation 
appealed at first only to a few readers, and it was not really estab- 
lished until the publication of Mrs. Shelley's edition of his works in 
four volumes in 1839. Since then his fame has become intensely 
strong with some readers, chiefly the young and the idealistic, but it 
has never been altogether widespread. He has not achieved, for ex- 
ample, such popularity as Tennyson and Longfellow. His life and 
character have been made the subject of partisan debate, and a trust- 
worthy verdict with regard to the man and his works is hard to obtain. 
It seems clear, however, that he was personally very attractive through 
his youthful, spiritual appearance, through his gentle, unworldly char- 
acter, and through his high aspirations for all that is noble and beauti- 
ful, especially for whatever will help humanity. His actions may often 
be censured with justice, but it is scarcely necessary to impugn his 
motives, if indeed it is not positively unfair and uncharitable to do so. 
Much the same thing may be said of his poetry. Not a little of it is 
immature and hazy in thought, and it is equally unsatisfactory when 
viewed from the point of view of style, being unrestrained and lack- 
ing in form. But one never fails to respect the ideals that inspired the 



THE AUTHORS xxix 

writing of even his least satisfactory poems, and one perceives that 
to the day of his death he was steadily growing both as a thinker and 
as an artist. He was becoming a truer observer of life and was mak- 
ing himself a good scholar, critic, and writer of prose ; and this self- 
training was reacting upon his poetry, as is seen in the almost perfect 
poise of thought, imagination, and expression to be observed in the 
" Ode to the West Wind." 

It is true that, since his ideals were passive rather than active, and 
since sorrow and longing are the burden of much of his singing, he 
has never appealed, as Byron did and does, to positive, aggressive 
spirits. It is also true that what is perhaps his most unique poetic 
endowment, his almost Greek faculty of endowing with life mythical 
figures and conceptions, gives a remote and unreal and impractical 
character to his writings in the eyes of the mass of readers. But it 
is equally true that some of his shorter poems, particularly some of 
the exquisite snatches of melodious sadness to be found in this vol- 
ume, have become genuine classics, and that in his entire works and 
in his life many fine spirits have found stimulation to noble thought 
and action. To be the chosen poet of idealists is an enviable fate. 

KEATS 

John Keats, like Wordsworth, is probably a less typically lyrical 
poet than Shelley, certainly in so far as concerns those two important 
elements of the lyrical genius — spontaneity and aspiration. Keats has 
these qualities, of course, — witness " In a drear-nighted December" 
and the " Ode to a Nightingale," — but we think of him as a master 
of the art-lyric rather than of less elaborately studied and more strictly 
personal forms of lyric poetry. More than any other modern British 
poet, perhaps, he has influenced the art of other poets and has de- 
lighted readers keenly alive to beauty and nobility of imagination 
expressed in chosen words ; but Wordsworth makes a deeper intel- 
lectual and moral appeal to many lovers of poetry, and Shelley kindles 
greater personal affection and inspires more surely to pure idealism 
of thought and feeling. Then again, Keats is not only an art-lyrist — 
observe his great success as a writer of sonnets and odes and the 



XXX SELECTED POEMS 

essentially literary quality of much of his inspiration — but he is just 
as important as an idyllic, or descriptive, and as a narrative, poet ; in 
other words, as the author of " The Eve of St. Agnes," of " Lamia," 
and of the first draft of " Hyperion." Still, although partly in con- 
sequence of the range of his genius, partly as a result of his bad health 
and early death, the lyric poetry of Keats is not specially notable in 
amount, or perhaps in variety, it is so superb in quality, so repre- 
sentative of the best traditions and achievements of British poetry, 
that, if any reader prefers his lyrics to those of either Wordsworth 
or Shelley, such a reader is surely within his rights in forming and 
expressing his preference. 

Keats was born late in October, 1795, in London, at a stable in 
Finsburg Pavement, where his father was employed. By the time 
he was fifteen he had lost both parents, but two brothers and a sister 
survived with him. He was sent to a school at Enfield, where the 
son of the master, afterwards a well-known literary man, Charles 
Cowden Clarke, encouraged his taste for literature. Unfortunately 
his guardian took him from this school and apprenticed him to a 
surgeon at Edmonton, He much preferred to read poetry, especially 
"The Faerie Queene " of Spenser, and after some time he broke withi 
the surgeon and went to study in the London hospitals. The youth 
who could write such a sonnet as " On first looking into Chapman's 
Homer" was meant, however, to be a poet and nothing but a poet; 
and we soon find Keats, especially after he came under the influence 
of Leigh Hunt, preparing himself by reading and writing poetry to 
take his place with Byron and Shelley and the other singers of that 
day of romantic song. 

His first printed poem was a sonnet which appeared in 1816, in 
Hunt's paper. The Exami7ier. He made friends with a few literary 
men and artists, and early in 181 7 he published his first volume 
under the simple title, " Poems by John Keats." It created no sen- 
sation, but he took his disappointment philosophically and resolved 
to improve himself by further study of the great poets. He under- 
took a long poem, " Endymion," and, despite the distractions of some 
travel about England, finished it before the end of 181 7. On its 
publication in 181 8 it did not answer his expectations, for its faults 



THE AUTHORS xxxi 

of extravagance and excessive lusciousness were as apparent as its 
florid beauties ; but, even before it was published, he had begun writ- 
ing poems, such as the metrical narrative " Isabella," that showed 
maturing thought and better-regulated art. 

Then, still fascinated with Greek themes, although he did not 
know the language, he began his great fragmentary poem " Hype- 
rion," modeling his style upon that of Milton. This was in the fall 
of 1818, after he had undergone the strain of nursing a dying brother, 
and after he had impaired his own health by exposure on a tour 
among the Lakes and in Scotland. About the same time he fell 
overwhelmingly in love with a Miss Fanny Brawne, whom he was 
destined not to marry and to whom he addressed letters so unre- 
strained that their subsequent publication cannot but be regretted. 
Yet, although at the beginning of his physical decline, he was ris- 
ing to the consummate artistic achievements that have given him a 
high and permanent place among British poets. Between December, 
1 81 8, and May, 18 19, he wrote " The Eve of St. Agnes," the odes, 
" On a Grecian Urn " and '' To a Nightingale," and one or two 
simpler but scarcely less beautiful lyrics. During the rest of the 
year he struggled with disease, poverty, and his hopeless love ; he 
began a tragedy ; and he finished what is probably his most mature 
narrative poem, *' Lamia." He recast " Hyperion," for the worse, 
and he became moody and suspicious ; but none can have the heart 
to blame him. 

Early in 1820 he had his first hemorrhage from the lungs. When 
he grew stronger, he saw through the press his third volume — one of 
the most extraordinarily fine single volumes of poetry^ in the language. 
Other hemorrhages showed, however, that the promise of " Lamia " 
and the great odes was not to be kept — that Keats had reached his 
highest point. It was decided that he should try the milder climate 
of Italy, and in September, 1820, he sailed for Naples with his artist 
friend, Joseph Severn. A little later, in Rome, he grew worse, and 
there he finally died on February 23, 1821. He was buried in the 
Protestant cemetery, where the ashes of his elegist Shelley were 
soon to repose, and on his tomb was placed, at his own wish, the 
unfulfilled epitaph, '' Here lies one whose name was writ in water." 



xxxii SELECTED POEMS 

His fame has risen steadily until it is not uncommon to hear him 
mentioned along with Shakespeare and Milton. It may be doubted 
whether, even if he had been granted long life and perfect health, he 
would have equaled them in variety and sustained power — his defects 
of stock, temperament, and training would probably have prevented 
this — but it can scarcely be doubted that he was a poet of very re- 
markable native endowment, particularly in his appreciation of the 
richer forms of beauty and in his capacity for artistic expression. Most 
of his work before and after the great volume of 1820 is immature or 
else deleteriously affected by his declining health, and even his most 
satisfactory work often gives a suggestion of oversensuousness. But, 
when all is said, the absolute value of his best poems, whether narra- 
tive or lyric, and the effect of his art upon subsequent poets, entitle 
him to a place with the best of the modern masters — a place inferior 
only to that occupied by the supreme classics. 



THE EDITOR 

Francis Turner Palgrave, the anthologist of the " Golden Treasury," 
from which this little book is made up, was born at Great Yarmouth, 
September 28, 1824. His father was Sir Francis Palgrave, a noted 
historian and antiquary, and the home in which he grew up was one 
of great culture as well as scholarship. The remarkable taste, there- 
fore, which made so valuable the selection of the poems in the " Golden 
Treasury" was the inheritance of his family. After five years at 
the Charterhouse he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he dis- 
tinguished himself and won an Exeter fellowship. 

For some months in 1846 Palgrave was a private secretary to 
W. E. Gladstone; from 1850 to 1855 he was vice principal of a 
training school for teachers at Twickenham, where Tennyson then 
lived. From this time dates their close friendship. It was on one of 
many summer trips together that Palgrave evolved the plan of his 
great anthology. In his recollections of Tennyson contributed to the 
** Memoir" by Hallam Tennyson, he says: 

"I had put the scheme of my 'Golden Treasury' before him 
during a walk near the Land's End in the late summer of 1 860, and 
he encouraged me to proceed, barring only any poems by himself 
from insertion in an anthology whose tide claimed excellence for its 
contents. And at the Christmastide following, the gathered materials, 
already submitted to the judgment of two friends of taste (one, the 
very able sculptor, T. Woolner, lately taken from us), were laid before 
Tennyson for final judgment." 

The anthology was published in 1861 and took its place among 
lyrical collections as second only to the " Greek Anthology." Until 
1 884 Palgrave was an industrious public servant in the education de- 
partment of the government. He had also written volumes of verse 
and had made other less famous anthologies. From 1885 to 1895 
he was professor of poetry at Oxford, and his last publication was 
his collection of University lectures, " Landscape in Poetry." He 
died October 24, 1897. 



SELECTED POEMS OF 
WORDSWORTH 



She was a Phantom of delight 
When first she gleam'd upon my sight ; 
A lovely Apparition, sent 
To be a moment's ornament ; 
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair ; 
Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair ; 
But all things else about her drawn 
From May time and the cheerful dawn ; 
A dancing shape, an image gay, 
To haunt, to starde, and waylay. 

I saw her upon nearer view, 

A Spirit, yet a Woman too ! 

Her household motions light and free, 

And steps of virgjn-liberty ; 

A countenance in which did meet 

Sweet records, promises as sweet ; 

A creature not too bright or good 

For human nature's daily food, 

For transient sorrows, simple wiles. 

Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles. 

And now I see with eye serene 
The very pulse of the machine ; 
A being breathing thoughtful breath, 
A traveler between life and death : 



SELECTED POEMS 

The reason firm, the temperate will, 
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill ; 
A perfect Woman, nobly plann'd 
To warn, to comfort, and command ; 
And yet a Spirit still, and bright 
With something of an angel light. 



She dwelt among the untrodden ways 

Beside the springs of Dove ; 
A maid whom there were none to praise. 

And very few to love. lo 

A violet by a mossy stone 

Half-hidden from the eye ! 
— Fair as a star, when only one 

Is shining in the sky. 

She lived unknown, and few could know 15 

When Lucy ceased to be ; ^ 

But she is in her grave, and, oh, 
The difference to me ! 

Ill 

I travel'd among unknown men 

In lands beyond the sea ; 20 

Nor, England ! did I know till then 

What love I bore to thee. 

'T is past, that melancholy dream ! 

Nor will I quit thy shore 
A second time ; for still I seem 25 

To love thee more and more. 

Among thy mountains did I feel 

The joy of my desire ; 
And she I cherish'd turn'd her wheel 

Beside an English fire. 30 



WORDSWORTH 

Thy mornings show'd, thy nights conceal'd 
The bowers where Lucy play'd ; 

And thine too is the last green field 
That Lucy's eyes survey'd. 



Three years she grew in sun and shower ; 5 

Then Nature said, '' A lovelier flower 

On earth was never sown : 

This Child I to myself will take ; 

She shall be mine, and I will make 

A lady of my own. 10 

" Myself will to my darling be 

Both law and impulse : and with me 

The girl, in rock and plain. 

In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 

Shall feel an overseeing power 15 

To kindle or restrain. 

"She shall be sportive as the fawn 

That wild with glee across the lawn 

Or up the mountain springs ; 

And her's shall be the breathing balm, 20 

And her's the silence and the calm 

Of mute insensate things. 

" The floating clouds their state shall lend 

To her ; for her the willow bend ; 

Nor shall she fail to see 25 

Ev'n in the motions of the storm 

Grace that shall mold the maiden's form 

By silent sympathy. 

" The stars of midnight shall be dear 

To her ; and she shall lean her ear 30 

In many a secret place 



SELECTED POEMS 

Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
And beauty born of murmuring sound 
Shall pass into her face. 

" And vital feelings of delight 
Shall rear her form to stately height, 
Her virgin bosom swell ; 
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give 
While she and I together live 
Here in this happy dell." 

Thus Nature spake — The work was done — 

How soon my Lucy's race was run ! 

She died, and left to me 

This heath, this calm and quiet scene ; 

The memory of what has been. 

And never more will be. 



A slumber did my spirit seal ; 

I had no human fears : 
She seem'd a thing that could not feel 

The touch of earthly years. 

No motion has she now, no force ; 20 

She neither hears nor sees ; 
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course 

With rocks, and stones, and trees. 

VI 

LUCY GRAY, OR SOLITUDE 

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray : 

And when I cross'd the wild, 25 

I chanced to see at break of day 

The solitary child. 



WORDSWORTH 

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew ; 
She dwelt on a wide moor, 
The sweetest thing that ever grew 
Beside a human door ! 

You yet may spy the fawn at play. 
The hare upon the green ; 
But the sweet face of Lucy Gray 
Will never more be seen. 

" To-night will be a stormy night — 
You to the town must go ; 
And take a lantern, Child, to light 
Your mother through the snow." 

" That, Father ! will I gladly do : 
'T is scarcely afternoon — 
The minster clock has just struck two. 
And yonder is the moon ! " 

At this the father raised his hook, 
And snapp'd a fagot band ; 
He plied his work ; — and Lucy took 
The lantern in her hand. 

Not blither is the mountain roe : 
With many a wanton stroke 
Her feet disperse the powdery snow. 
That rises up like smoke. 

The storm came on before its time : 
She wander'd up and down ; 
And many a hill did Lucy climb : 
But never reach'd the town. 

The wretched parents all that night 
Went shouting far and wide ; 
But there was neither sound nor sight 
To serve them for a guide. 



30 



SELECTED POEMS 

At daybreak on a hill they stood 
That overlook' d the moor; 
And thence they saw the bridge of wood 
A furlong from their door. 

They wept — and, turning homeward, cried 5 

"In heaven we all shall meet ! " 

— When in the snow the mother spied 
The print of Lucy's feet. 

Then downwards from the steep hill's edge 

They track'd the footmarks small ; 10 

And through the broken hawthorn hedge. 

And by the long stonewall : 

And then an open field they cross'd : 

The marks were still the same ; 

They track'd them on, nor ever lost ; 1 5 

And to the bridge they came : 

They follow'd from the snowy bank 

Those footmarks, one by one, 

Into the middle of the plank ; 

And further there were none ! 20 

— Yet some maintain that to this day 
She is a living child ; 

That you may see sweet Lucy Gray 
Upon the lonesome wild. 

O'er rough and smooth she trips along, 25 

And never looks behind ; 
And sings a solitary song 
That whistles in the wind. 

VII 

Why art thou silent ! Is thy love a plant 

Of such weak fiber that the treacherous air 30 

Of absence withers what was once so fair ? 

Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant? 



WORDSWORTH 7 

Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant, 
Bound to thy service with unceasing care — 
The mind's least generous wish a mendicant 
For naught but what thy happiness could spare. 

Speak ! — though this soft warm heart, once free to hold 5 
A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine. 
Be left more desolate, more dreary cold 

Than a forsaken bird's nest fill'd with snow 

'Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine — 

Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know ! 10 

VIII 

Surprised by joy — impatient as the wind — 
I turn'd to share the transport — Oh ! with whom 
But Thee — deep buried in the silent tomb. 
That spot which no vicissitude can find ? 

Love, faithful love, recall'd thee to my mind — 15 

But how could I forget thee ? Through what power 
Even for the least division of an hour 
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind 

To my most grievous loss ! — That thought's return 

Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore 20 

Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, 

Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more ; 
That neither present time, nor years unborn 
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore. 

IX 

ODE TO DUTY 

Stern Daughter of the Voice of God ! 25 

O Duty ! if that name thou love 
Who art a light to guide, a rod 
To check the erring, and reprove ; 



SELECTED POEMS 

Thou who art victory and law 
When empty terrors overawe ; 
From vain temptations dost set free, 
And calm'st the weary strife of frail humanity ! 

There are who ask not if thine eye 5 

Be on them ; who, in love and truth 
Where no misgiving is, rely 
Upon the genial sense of youth : 
Glad hearts ! without reproach or blot, 
Who do thy work, and know it not : 10 

Oh ! if through confidence misplaced 
They fail, thy saving arms, dread Power ! around them cast. 

Serene will be our days and bright 
And happy will our nature be 

When love is an unerring light, 15 

And joy its own security. 
And they a blissful course may hold 
Ev'n now, who, not unwisely bold, 
Live in the spirit of this creed ; 
Yet seek thy firm support, according to their need. 20 

I, loving freedom, and untried. 
No sport of every random gust, 
Yet being to myself a guide. 
Too blindly have reposed my trust : 

And oft, when in my heart was heard 25 

Thy timely mandate, I deferr'd 
The task, in smoother walks to stray ; 
But thee I now would serve more strictly, if I may. 

Through no disturbance of my soul 

Or strong compunction in me wrought, 30 

I supplicate for thy control, 

But in the quietness of thought : 



WORDSWORTH 9 

Me this uncharter'd freedom tires ; 
I feel the weight of chance desires : 
My hopes no more must change their name ; 
I long for a repose that ever is the same. 

Stern Lawgiver ! yet thou dost wear 5 

The Godhead's most benignant grace ; 
Nor know we anything so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face : 
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, 
And fragrance in thy footing treads ; 10 

Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong ; 
And the most ancient Heavens, through Thee, are fresh and 
strong. 

To humbler functions, awful Power ! 
I call thee : I myself commend 

Unto thy guidance from this hour; 15 

Oh let my weakness have an end ! 
Give unto me, made lowly wise, 
The spirit of self-sacrifice ; 
The confidence of reason give ; 
And in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live. 20 



THOUGHT OF A BRITON ON THE SUBJUGATION 
OF SWITZERLAND 

Two Voices are there ; one is of the Sea, 
One of the Mountains ; each a mighty voice : 
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice. 
They were thy chosen music, Liberty ! 

There came a tyrant, and with holy glee 
Though fought'st against him, — but hast vainly striven : 
Thou from thy Alpine holds at length art driven, 
Where not a torrent murmurs heard by thee. 



lo SELECTED POEMS 

— Of one deep bliss thine ear hath been bereft ; 
Then cleave, O cleave to that which still is left — 
For, high-soul'd Maid, what sorrow would it be 

That Mountain floods should thunder as before, 
And Ocean bellow from his rocky shore, 
And neither awful Voice be heard by Thee ! 



XI 

ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC 

Once did She hold the gorgeous East in fee 

And was the safeguard of the West ; the worth 

Of Venice did not faM below her birth, 

Venice, the eldest child of Liberty. i 

She was a maiden city, bright and free ; 

No guile seduced, no force could violate ; 

And when she took unto herself a mate, 

She must espouse the everlasting Sea. ^ 

And what if she had seen those glories fade, i 

Those titles vanish, and that strength decay, — 
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid 

When her long life hath reach'd its final day : 

Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade 

Of that which once was great is pass'd away. 21 

XII 

WRITTEN IN LONDON, SEPTEMBER, 1802 

O Friend ! I know not which way I must look 

For comfort, being, as I am, opprest 

To think that now our life is only drest 

For show ; mean handiwork of craftsman, cook, 



WORDSWORTH ii 

Or groom ! — We must run glittering like a brook 
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest ; 
The wealthiest man among us is the best : 
No grandeur now in nature or in book 

Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, 5 

This is idolatry ; and these we adore : 
Plain living and high thinking are no more : 

The homely beauty of the good old cause 
Is gone ; our peace, our fearful innocence. 
And pure religion breathing household laws. 10 

XIII 

LONDON, 1802 

Milton ! thou shouldst be living at this hour : 
England hath need of thee : she is a fen 
Of stagnant waters : altar, sword, and pen, 
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, 

Have forfeited their ancient English dower 15 

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men : 

Oh ! raise us up, return to us again ; 

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. 

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart : 

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, 20 

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free ; 

So didst thou travel on life's common way 
In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 
The lowliest duties on herself did lay. 

XIV 

When I have borne in memory what has tamed 25 

Great nations ; how ennobling thoughts depart 
When men change swords for ledgers, and desert 
The student's bower for gold, — some fears unnamed 



12 SELECTED POEMS 

I had, my Country ! — am I to be blamed ? 
Now, when I think of thee, and what thou art. 
Verily, in the bottom of my heart 
Of those unfilial fears I am ashamed. 

For dearly must we prize thee ; we who find 5 

In thee a bulwark for the cause of men ; 
And I by my affection was beguiled : 

What wonder if a Poet now and then, 

Among the many movements of his mind. 

Felt for thee as a lover or a child ! 10 

XV 

SIMON LEE, THE OLD HUNTSMAN 

In the sweet shire of Cardigan, 

Not far from pleasant Ivor Hall, 

An old man dwells, a Httle man, — 

'T is said he once was tall. 

Full five-and-thirty years he lived 15 

A running huntsman merry ; 

And still the center of his cheek 

Is red as a ripe cherry. 

No man Hke him the horn could sound. 

And hill and valley rang with glee, 20 

When Echo bandied, round and round. 

The halloo of Simon Lee. 

In those proud days he little cared 

For husbandry or tillage ; 

To blither tasks did Simon rouse 25 

The sleepers of the village. 

He all the country could outrun, 

Could leave both man and horse behind ; 

And often, ere the chase was done, 

He reel'd and was stone blind. 30 



WORDSWORTH 13 

And still there 's something in the world 
At which his heart rejoices ; 
For when the chiming hounds are out, 
He dearly loves their voices. 

But oh the heavy change ! — bereft 5 

Of health, strength, friends, and kindred, see ! 

Old Simon to the world is left 

In liveried poverty. 

His master 's dead, and no one now 

Dwells in the Hall of Ivor ; 10 

Men, dogs, and horses, all are dead ; 

He is the sole survivor. 

And he is lean and he is sick, 

His body, dwindled and awry, 

Rests upon ankles swoln and thick ; 1 5 

His legs are thin and dry. 

One prop he has, and only one, — 

His wife, an aged woman. 

Lives with him, near the waterfall. 

Upon the village common. 20 

Beside their moss-grown hut of clay, 

Not twenty paces from the door, 

A scrap of land they have, but they 

Are poorest of the poor. 

This scrap of land he from the heath 25 

Inclosed when he was stronger ; 

But what to them avails the land 

Which he can till no longer ? 

Oft, working by her husband's side, 

Ruth does what Simon cannot do ; 30 

For she, with scanty cause for pride, 

Is stouter of the two. 



14 SELECTED POEiMS 

And, though you with your utmost skill 
From labor could not wean them, 
'T is little, very little, all 
That they can do between them. 

Few months of life has he in store 5 

As he to you will tell, 

For still, the more he works, the more 

Do his weak ankles swell. 

My gentle Reader, I perceive 

How patiently you 've waited, 10 

And now I fear that you expect 

Some tale will be related. 

O Reader ! had you in your mind 

Such stores as silent thought can bring, 

O gentle Reader ! you would find 1 5 

A tale in everything. 

What more I have to say is short, 

And you must kindly take it : 

It is no tale ; but, should you think. 

Perhaps a tale you '11 make it. 20 

One summer day I chanced to see 

This old Man doing all he could 

To unearth the root of an old tree, 

A stump of rotten wood. 

The mattock totter'd in his hand ; 25 

So vain was his endeavor 

That at the root of the old tree 

He might have work'd forever. 

" You 're overtask'd, good Simon Lee, 

Give me your tool," to him I said ; 30 

And at the word right gladly he 

Received my proffer'd aid. 



WORDSWORTH 15 

I struck, and with a single blow 
The tangled root I sever'd, 
At which the poor old man so long 
And vainly had endeavor'd. 

The tears into his eyes were brought, 5 

And thanks and praises seem'd to run 

So fast out of his heart, I thought 

They never would have done. 

— I 've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds 

With coldness still returning ; 10 

Alas ! the gratitude of men 

Hath oftener left me mourning. 

XVI 

THE SMALL CELANDINE 

There is a Flower, the lesser Celandine, 

That shrinks like many more from cold and rain, 

And the first moment that the sun may shine, 1 5 

Bright as the sun himself, 't is out again ! 

When hailstones have been falling, swarm on swarm. 

Or blasts the green field and the trees distrest, 

Oft have I seen it muffled up from harm 

In close self-shelter, like a thing at rest. 20 

But lately, one rough day, this Flower I past. 
And recognized it, though an alter'd form, 
Now standing forth an offering to the blast, 
And buffeted at will by rain and storm. 

I stopp'd, and said, with inly-mutter'd voice, 25 

" It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold ; 
This neither is its courage nor its choice. 
But its necessity in being old. 



i6 SELECTED POEMS 

" The sunshine may not cheer it, nor the dew ; 
It cannot help itself in its decay ; 
Stiff in its members, withered, changed of hue/' — 
And, in my spleen, I smiled that it was gray. 

To be a prodigal's favorite — then, worse truth, 
A miser's pensioner — behold our lot ! 
O Man ! that from thy fair and shining youth 
Age might but take the things Youth needed not ! 



THE AFFLICTION OF MARGARET 

Where art thou, my beloved Son, 

Where art thou, worse to me than dead? lo 

Oh find me, prosperous or undone ! 

Or if the grave be now thy bed, 

Why am I ignorant of the same 

That I may rest ; and neither blame 

Nor sorrow may attend thy name? 15 

Seven years, alas ! to have received 

No tidings of an only child — 

To have despair'd, have hoped, believed, 

And been for evermore beguiled, — 

Sometimes with thoughts of very bliss ! 20 

I catch at them, and then I miss ; 

Was ever darkness like to this? 

He was among the prime in worth. 

An object beauteous to behold ; 

Well born, well bred ; I sent him forth 25 

Ingenuous, innocent, and bold : 

If things ensued that wanted grace 

As hath been said, they were not base ; 

And never blush was on my face. 



WORDSWORTH 17 

Ah ! little doth the young one dream 

When full of play and childish cares, 

What power is in his wildest scream 

Heard by his mother unawares ! 

He knows it not, he cannot guess ; 5 

Years to a mother bring distress ; 

But do not make her love the less. 

Neglect me ! no, I suffer'd long 

From that ill thought ; and being blind 

Said, " Pride shall help me in my wrong : 10 

Kind mother have I been, as kind 

As ever breathed : " and that is true ; 

I 've wet my path with tears like dew, 

Weeping for him when no one knew. 

My Son, if thou be humbled, poor, 15 

Hopeless of honor and of gain. 

Oh ! do not dread thy mother's door ; 

Think not of me with grief and pain : 

I now can see with better eyes ; 

And worldly grandeur I despise 20 

And fortune with her gifts and lies. 

Alas ! the fowls of heaven have wings. 

And blasts of heaven will aid their flight ; 

They mount — how short a voyage brings 

The wanderers back to their delight ! 25 

Chains tie us down by land and sea ; 

And wishes, vain as mine, may be 

All that is left to comfort thee. 

Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan 

Maim'd, mangled by inhuman men ; 30 

Or thou upon a desert thrown 

Inheritest the lion's den : 



i8 SELECTED POEMS 

Or hast been summon'd to the deep 
Thou, thou, and all thy mates to keep 
An incommunicable sleep. 

I look for ghosts : but none will force 

Their way to me ; 't is falsely said 5 

That there was ever intercourse 

Between the living and the dead ; 

For surely then I should have sight 

Of him I wait for day and night 

With love and longings infinite. 10 

My apprehensions come in crowds ; 

I dread the rustling of the grass ; 

The very shadows of the clouds 

Have power to shake me as they pass : 

I question things, and do not find 15 

One that will answer to my mind ; 

And all the world appears unkind. 

Beyond participation lie 

My troubles, and beyond relief : 

If any chance to heave a sigh 20 

They pity me, and not my grief. 

Then come to me, my Son, or send 

Some tidings that my woes may end ! 

I have no other earthly friend. 

XVIII 

TO A SKYLARK 

Ethereal minstrel ! pilgrim of the sky ! 25 

Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound? 

Or while the wings aspire, are heart and eye 

Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground ? 

Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will, 

Those quivering wings composed, that music still ! 30 



WORDSWORTH 19 

To the last point of vision, and beyond 

Mount, daring warbler ! — that love-prompted strain 

— 'Twixt thee and thine a never-failing bond — 

Thrills not the less the bosom of the plain : 

Yet might'st thou seem, proud privilege ! to sing 5 

All independent of the leafy Spring. 

Leave to the nightingale her shady wood ; 

A privacy of glorious light is thine, 

Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood 

Of harmony, with instinct more divine ; 10 

Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam — 

True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home. 



THE GREEN LINNET 

Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed 

Their snow-white blossoms on my head. 

With brightest sunshine round me spread 15 

Of Spring's unclouded weather. 

In this sequester' d nook how sweet 

To sit upon my orchard seat ! 

And flowers and birds once more to greet, 

My last year's friends together. 20 

One have I mark'd, the happiest guest 

In all this covert of the blest : 

Hail to Thee, far above the rest 

In joy of voice and pinion ! 

Thou, Linnet ! in thy green array, 25 

Presiding Spirit here to-day. 

Dost lead the revels of the May ; 

And this is thy dominion. 

While birds, and butterflies, and flowers, 

Make all one band of paramours, 3° 

Thou, ranging up and down the bowers. 



20 SELECTED POEMS 

Art sole in thy employment ; 

A Life, a Presence like the air, 

Scattering thy gladness without care. 

Too blest with any one to pair ; 

Thyself thy own enjoyment. 5 

Amid yon tuft of hazel trees 

That twinkle to the gusty breeze, 

Behold him perch'd in ecstasies, 

Yet seeming still to hover ; 

There ! where the flutter of his wings 10 

Upon his back and body flings 

Shadows and sunny glimmerings, 

That cover him all over. 

My dazzled sight he oft deceives — 

A brother of the dancing leaves ; 15 

Then flits, and from the cottage eaves 

Pours forth his song in gushes ; 

As if by that exulting strain 

He mock'd and treated with disdain 

The voiceless Form he chose to feign, 20 

While fluttering in the bushes. 

XX 

TO THE CUCKOO 

blithe newcomer ! I have heard, 

1 hear thee and rejoice : 

O Cuckoo ! shall I call thee Bird, 

Or but a wandering Voice ? 25 

While I am lying on the grass 
Thy twofold shout I hear ; 
From hill to hill it seems to pass. 
At once far off and near. 



WORDSWORTH 21 

Though babbling only to the vale 
Of sunshine and of flowers, 
Thou bringest unto me a tale 
Of visionary hours. 

Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring ! 5 

Even yet thou art to me 

No bird, but an invisible thing, 

A voice, a mystery ; 

The same whom in my schoolboy days 

I listened to ; that Cry 10 

Which made me look a thousand ways 

In bush, and tree, and sky. 

To seek thee did I often rove 

Through woods and on the green ; 

And thou wert still a hope, a love ; 1 5 

Still long'd for, never seen ! 

And I can listen to thee yet ; 

Can lie upon the plain 

And listen, till I do beget 

That golden time again, 20 

O blessed Bird ! the earth we pace 
Again appears to be 
An unsubstantial, faery place. 
That is fit home for Thee ! 



COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE 
SEPTEMBER 3, 1802 

Earth has not anything to show more fair : 25 

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 

A sight so touching in its majesty : 

This City now doth like a garment wear ■ 



22 SELECTED POEMS 

The beauty of the morning ; silent, bare, 
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie 
Open unto the fields, and to the sky, — 
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. 

Never did sun more beautifully steep 5 

In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill ; 
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep ! 

The river glideth at its own sweet will : 

Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep ; 

And all that mighty heart is lying still ! 10 

XXII 

COMPOSED AT NEIDPATH CASTLE 

Degenerate Douglas ! oh, the unworthy lord ! 
Whom mere despite of heart could so far please 
And love of havoc, (for with such disease 
Fame taxes him,) that he could send forth word 

To level with the dust a noble horde, 15 

A brotherhood of venerable trees. 
Leaving an ancient dome, and towers like these, 
Beggar'd and outraged ! — Many hearts deplored 

The fate of those old trees ; and oft with pain 

The traveler at this day will stop and gaze 20 

On wrongs, which Nature scarcely seems to heed : 

For shelter'd places, bosoms, nooks, and bays, 
And the pure mountains, and the gende Tweed, 
And the green silent pastures, yet remain. 



WORDSWORTH 23 

XXIII 
ADMONITION 

Well may'st thou halt — and gaze with brightening eye ! 

— The lovely Cottage in the guardian nook 
Hath stirr'd thee deeply ; with its own dear brook, 
Its own small pasture, almost its own sky ! 

But covet not the abode ; forbear to sigh 5 

As many do, repining while they look ; 
Intruders — who would tear from Nature's book 
This precious leaf with harsh impiety. 

— Think what the home must be if it were thine, 

Even thine, though few thy wants ! — Roof, window, door, 10 
The very flowers are sacred to the Poor, 

The roses to the porch which they entwine : 
Yea, all that now enchants thee, from the day 
On which it should be touch'd, would melt away ! 

XXIV 

TO A HIGHLAND GIRL AT INVERSNEYDE 

Sweet Highland Girl, a very shower 15 

Of beauty is thy earthly dower ! 

Twice seven consenting years have shed 

Their utmost bounty on thy head : 

And these gray rocks, that household lawn, 

Those trees — a veil just half withdrawn, 20 

This fall of water that doth make 

A murmur near the silent lake, 

This little bay, a quiet road 

That holds in shelter thy abode ; 

In truth together ye do seem 25 

Like something fashion'd in a dream ; 

Such forms as from their covert peep 

When earthly cares are laid asleep ! 



24 SELECTED POEMS 

But O fair Creature ! in the light 

Of common day, so heavenly bright, 

I bless Thee, Vision as thou art, 

I bless thee with a human heart : 

God shield thee to thy latest years ! 5 

Thee neither know I nor thy peers : 

And yet my eyes are fill'd with tears. 

With earnest feeling I shall pray 

For thee when I am far away ; 

For never saw I mien or face 10 

In which more plainly I could trace 

Benignity and home-bred sense 

Ripening in perfect innocence. 

Here scattered, like a random seed, 

Remote from men. Thou dost not need 15 

The embarrass'd look of shy distress, 

And maidenly shamefacedness : 

Thou wear'st upon thy forehead clear 

The freedom of a Mountaineer : 

A face with gladness overspread ; 20 

Soft smiles, by human kindness bred ; 

And seemliness complete, that sways 

Thy courtesies, about thee plays ; 

With no restraint, but such as springs 

From quick and eager visitings 25 

Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach 

Of thy few words of English speech : 

A bondage sweetly brook'd, a strife 

That gives thy gestures grace and life ! 

So have I, not unmoved in mind, 30 

Seen birds of tempest-loving kind — 

Thus beating up against the wind. 

What hand but would a garland cull 
For thee who art so beautiful ? 



WORDSWORTH 25 

happy pleasure ! here to dwell 
Beside thee in some heathy dell ; 
Adopt your homely ways, and dress, 
A shepherd, thou a shepherdess ! 

But I could frame a wish for thee 5 

More like a grave reality : 

Thou art to me but as a wave 

Of the wild sea : and I would have 

Some claim upon thee, if I could. 

Though but of common neighborhood. 10 

What joy to hear thee, and to see ! 

Thy elder brother I would be, 

Thy father — anything to thee. 

Now thanks to Heaven ! that of its grace 

Hath led me to this lonely place : 15 

Joy have I had ; and going hence 

1 bear away my recompense. 

In spots like these it is we prize 

Our Memory, feel that she hath eyes : 

Then why should I be loath to stir ? 20 

I feel this place was made for her ; 

To give new pleasure like the past. 

Continued long as life shall last. 

Nor am I loth, though pleased at heart, 

Sweet Highland Girl ! from thee to part ; 25 

For I, methinks, till I grow old 

As fair before me shall behold 

As I do now, the cabin small, 

The lake, the bay, the waterfall ; 

And Thee, the Spirit of them all ! 30 



26 SELECTED POEMS 



THE SOLITARY REAPER 

Behold her, single in the field, 

Yon solitary Highland Lass ! 

Reaping and singing by herself ; 

Stop here, or gently pass ! 

Alone she cuts and binds the grain, 5 

And sings a melancholy strain ; 

listen ! for the vale profound 
Is overflowing with the sound. 

No nightingale did ever chaunt 

More welcome notes to weary bands 10 

Of travelers in some shady haunt. 

Among Arabian sands : 

A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard 

In springtime from the cuckoo bird, 

Breaking the silence of the seas 15 

Among the farthest Hebrides. 

Will no one tell me what she sings? 

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 

For old, unhappy far-off things. 

And battles long ago : 20 

Or is it some more humble lay. 

Familiar matter of to-day ? 

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain. 

That has been, and may be again ! 

Whate'er the theme, the maiden sang 25 

As if her song could have no ending ; 

1 saw her singing at her work. 
And o'er the sickle bending ; — 
I listen'd, motionless and still ; 

And, as I mounted up the hill, 30 

The music in my heart I bore 
Long after it was heard no more. 



WORDSWORTH 27 

XXVI 

THE REVERIE OF POOR SUSAN 

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, 
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years : 
Poor Susan has pass'd by the spot, and has heard 
In the silence of morning the song of the bird. 

'T is a note of enchantment ; what ails her ? She sees 5 

A mountain ascending, a vision of trees ; 

Bright volumes of vapor through Lothbury glide. 

And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside, , 

Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale 

Down which she so often has tripp'd with her pail ; 10 

And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's. 

The one only dwelling on earth that she loves. 

She looks, and her heart is in heaven : but they fade, 

The mist and the river, the hill and the shade ; 

The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, 15 

And the colors have all pass'd away from her eyes ! 



I wander'd lonely as a cloud 

That floats on high o'er vales and hills, 

When all at once I saw a crowd, 

A host of golden daffodils, 

Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 

Continuous as the stars that shine 
And twinkle on the milky way. 
They stretch'd in never-ending line 
Along the margin of a bay : 
Ten thousand saw I at a glance 
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. 



28 SELECTED POEMS 

The waves beside them danced, but they 

Outdid the sparkling waves in glee : — 

A poet could not but be gay 

In such a jocund company ! 

I gazed — and gazed — but little thought 

What wealth the show to me had brought 

For oft, when on my couch I lie 
In vacant or in pensive mood, 
They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bhss of solitude ; 
And then my heart with pleasure fills, 
And dances with the daffodils. 



XXVIII 

TO THE DAISY 

With little here to do or see 

Of things that in the great world be, 

Sweet Daisy ! oft I talk to thee, 1 5 

For thou art worthy. 
Thou unassuming Commonplace 
Of Nature, with that homely face, 
And yet with something of a grace 

Which Love makes for thee ! 20 

Oft on the dappled turf at ease 

I sit and play with similes. 

Loose types of things through all degrees, 

Thoughts of thy raising ; 
And many a fond and idle name 25 

I give to thee, for praise or blame 
As is the humor of the game, 

While I am gazing. 



WORDSWORTH 29 

A nun demure, of lowly port ; 

Or sprightly maiden, of Love's court, 

In thy simplicity the sport 

Of all temptations ; 
A queen in crown of rubies drest ; 5 

A starveling in a scanty vest ; 
Are all, as seems to suit thee best, 

Thy appellations. 

A little Cyclops, with one eye 

Staring to threaten and defy, 10 

That thought comes next — and instantly 

The freak is over. 
The shape will vanish, and behold ! 
A silver shield with boss of gold 
That spreads itself, some faery bold 15 

In fight to cover. 



I see thee glittering from afar — 
And then thou art a pretty star, 
Not quite so fair as many are 

In heaven above thee ! 20 

Yet like a star, with glittering crest, 
Self-poised in air thou seem'st to rest ; — 
May peace come never to his nest 

Who shall reprove thee ! 

Bright Flower ! for by that name at last 25 

When all my reveries are past 
I call thee, and to that cleave fast, 

Sweet silent Creature ! 
That breath'st with me in sun and air, 
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair 30 

My heart with gladness, and a share 

Of thy meek nature ! 



30 SELECTED POEMS 



YARROW UNVISITED 

From Stirling Castle we had seen 

The mazy Forth unravel'd, 

Had trod the banks of Clyde and Tay, 

And with the Tweed had travel'd ; 

And when we came to Clovenford, 5 

Then said my '' winsome Marrow," 

" Whate'er betide, we '11 turn aside, 

And see the Braes of Yarrow." 

" Let Yarrow folk, frae Selkirk town, 

Who have been buying, selling, lo 

Go back to Yarrow, 't is their own, 

Each maiden to her dwelling ! 

On Yarrow's banks let herons feed. 

Hares couch, and rabbits burrow ; 

But we will downward with the Tweed, 1 5 

Nor turn aside to Yarrow. 

" There 's Gala Water, Leader Haughs, 

Both lying right before us ; 

And Dryburgh, where with chiming Tweed 

The lintwhites sing in chorus ; 20 

There 's pleasant Tiviot-dale, a land 

Made blithe with plow and harrow : 

Why throw away a needful day 

To go in search of Yarrow ? 

" What 's Yarrow but a river bare 25 

That glides the dark hills under? 

There are a thousand such elsewhere 

As worthy of your wonder." 

— Strange words they seem'd of slight and scorn ; 

My Truelove sigh'd'for sorrow, 30 

And look'd me in the face, to think 

I thus could speak of Yarrow ! 



WORDSWORTH 31 

" O green," said I, '' are Yarrow's holms, 

And sweet is Yarrow flowing ! 

Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, 

But we will leave it growing. 

O'er hilly path and open strath 5 

We '11 wander Scotland thorough ; 

But, though so near, we will not turn 

Into the dale of Yarrow. 

" Let beeves and home-bred kine partake 

The sweets of Burn-mill meadow ; 10 

The swan on still Saint Mary's Lake 

Float double, swan and shadow ! 

We will not see them ; will not go 

To-day, nor yet to-morrow ; 

Enough if in our hearts we know 1 5 

There 's such a place as Yarrow. 

" Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown ! 
It must, or we shall rue it : 
We have a vision of our own, 

Ah ! why should we undo it ? 20 

The treasured dreams of times long past, 
We '11 keep them, winsome Marrow ! 
For when we 're there, although 't is fair, 
'T will be another Yarrow ! 

" If Care with freezing years should come 25 

And wandering seem but folly, — 

Should we be loath to stir from home. 

And yet be melancholy ; 

Should life be dull, and spirits low, 

'T will soothe us in our sorrow 30 

That earth has something yet to show. 

The bonny holms of Yarrow ! " 



32 SELECTED POEMS 



YARROW VISITED, SEPTEMBER, 1814 

And is this — Yarrow ? — This the stream 

Of which my fancy cherish'd? 

So faithfully, a waking dream, 

An image that hath perish'd ! 

O that some minstrel's harp were near 5 

To utter notes of gladness 

And chase this silence from the air, 

That fills my heart with sadness ! 

Yet why ? — a silvery current flows 

With uncontroll'd meanderings ; 10 

Nor have these eyes by greener hills 

Been soothed, in all my wanderings. 

And, through her depths. Saint Mary's Lake 

Is visibly delighted ; 

For not a feature of those hills 1 5 

Is in the mirror slighted. 

A blue sky bends o'er Yarrow Vale, 

Save where that pearly whiteness 

Is round the rising sun diffused, 

A tender hazy brightness ; 20 

Mild dawn of promise ! that excludes 

All profitless dejection ; 

Though not unwilling here to admit 

A pensive recollection. 

Where was it that the famous Flower 25 

Of Yarrow Vale lay bleeding ? 

His bed perchance was yon smooth mound 

On which the herd is feeding : 

And haply from this crystal pool, 

Now peaceful as the morning, 30 

The Water wraith ascended thrice, 

And gave his doleful warning. 



WORDSWORTH 33 

Delicious is the lay that sings 

The haunts of happy lovers, 

The path that leads them to the grove, 

The leafy grove that covers : 

And pity sanctifies the verse 5 

That paints, by strength of sorrow, 

The unconquerable strength of love ; 

Bear witness, rueful Yarrow ! 

But thou that didst appear so fair 

To fond imagination, 10 

Dost rival in the light of day 

Her delicate creation : 

Meek loveliness is round thee spread, 

A softness still and holy : 

The grace of forest charms decay'd, 15 

And pastoral melancholy. 

That region left, the vale unfolds 

Rich groves of lofty stature. 

With Yarrow winding through the pomp 

Of cultivated nature ; 20 

And rising from those lofty groves 

Behold a ruin hoary. 

The shatter'd front of Newark's towers, 

Renown'd in Border story. 

Fair scenes for childhood's opening bloom, 25 

For sportive youth to stray in, 

For manhood to enjoy his strength, 

And age to wear away in ! 

Yon cottage seems a bower of bliss, 

A covert for protection 30 

Of tender thoughts that nestle there — 

The brood of chaste affection. 

How sweet on this autumnal day 
The wildwood fruits to gather, 



34 SELECTED POEMS 

And on my Truelove's forehead plant 

A crest of blooming heather ! 

'And what if I enwreathed my own ? 

'T were no offense to reason ; 

The sober hills thus deck their brows 5 

To meet the wintry season. 

I see — but not by sight alone, 

Loved Yarrow, have I won thee ; 

A ray of Fancy still survives — 

Her sunshine plays upon thee ! 10 

Thy ever-youthful waters keep 

A course of lively pleasure ; 

And gladsome notes my lips can breathe 

Accordant to the measure. 

The vapors linger round the heights, 15 

They melt, and soon must vanish ; 

One hour is theirs, nor more is mine — 

Sad thought ! which I would banish. 

But that I know, where'er I go. 

Thy genuine image. Yarrow ! 20 

Will dwell with me, to heighten joy. 

And cheer my mind in sorrow. 



It is a beauteous evening, calm and free ; 

The holy time is quiet as a Nun 

Breathless with adoration; the broad sun 25 

Is sinking down in its tranquillity ; 

The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea : 

Listen ! the mighty Being is awake. 

And doth with his eternal motion make 

A sound like thunder — everlastingly. 30 



WORDSWORTH 35 

Dear child ! dear girl ! that walkest with me here, 
If thou appear untouch'd by solemn thought 
Thy nature is not therefore less divine : 

Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, 

And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine, 5 

God being with thee when we know it not. 



TO SLEEP 

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by 

One after one ; the sound of rain, and bees 

Murmuring ; the fall of rivers, winds and seas, 

Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky ; 10 

I 've thought of all by turns, and yet do lie 
Sleepless ; and soon the small birds' melodies 
Must hear, first utter'd from my orchard trees, 
And the first cuckoo's melancholy cry. 

Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay, 15 

And could not win thee, Sleep ! by any stealth : 
So do not let me wear to-night away : 

Without Thee what is all the morning's wealth ? 

Come, blessed barrier between day and day. 

Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health ! 20 

XXXIII 

Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes 
To pace the ground, if path be there or none, 
While a fair region round the traveler lies 
Which he forbears again to look upon ; 

Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene, 25 

The work of Fancy, or some happy tone 

Of meditation, slipping in between 

The beauty coming and the beauty gone. 



36 SELECTED POEMS 

— If Thought and Love desert us, from that day 
Let us break off all commerce with the Muse : 
With Thought and Love companions of our way - 

Whate'er the senses take or may refuse, — 
The Mind's internal heaven shall shed her dews 
Of inspiration on the humblest lay. 



XXXIV 

LINES WRITTEN IN EARLY SPRING 

I heard a thousand blended notes 

While in a grove I sate reclined, 

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts 

Bring sad thoughts to the mind. lo 

To her fair works did Nature link 
The human soul that through me ran ; 
And much it grieved my heart to think 
What Man has made of Man. 

Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower, 1 5 

The periwinkle trail'd its wreaths ; 
And 't is my faith that every flower 
Enjoys the air it breathes. 

The birds around me hopp'd and play'd. 

Their thoughts I cannot measure, — 20 

But the least motion which they made 

It seem'd a thrill of pleasure. 

The budding twigs spread out their fan 

To catch the breezy air ; 

And I must think, do all I can, 25 

That there was pleasure there. 



WORDSWORTH 37 

If this belief from heaven be sent, 
If such be Nature's holy plan, 
Have I not reason to lament 
What Man has made of Man? 



RUTH 

When Ruth was left half desolate 5 

Her father took another mate ; 

And Ruth, not seven years old, 

A slighted child, at her own will 

Went wandering over dale and hill, 

In thoughtless freedom, bold. 10 

And she had made a pipe of straw. 

And music from that pipe could draw 

Like sounds of winds and floods ; 

Had built a bower upon the green, 

As if she from her birth had been 1$ 

An infant of the woods. 

Beneath her father's roof, alone 

She seem'd to live ; her thoughts her own ; 

Herself her own delight : 

Pleased with herself, nor sad nor gay ; 20 

And passing thus the livelong day. 

She grew to woman's height. 

There came a youth from Georgia's shore — 

A military casque he wore 

With splendid feathers drest ; 25 

He brought them from the Cherokees ; 

The feathers nodded in the breeze 

And made a gallant crest. 



38 SELECTED POEMS 

From Indian blood you deem him sprung: 

But no ! he spake the English tongue 

And bore a soldier's name ; 

And, when America was free 

From battle and from jeopardy, 5 

He 'cross the ocean came. 

With hues of genius on his cheek, 

In finest tones the youth could speak : 

— While he was yet a boy 

The moon, the glory of the sun, 10 

And streams that murmur as they run 

Had been his dearest joy. 

He was a lovely youth ! I guess 

The panther in the wilderness 

Was not so fair as he ; 15 

And when he chose to sport and play, 

No dolphin ever was so gay 

Upon the tropic sea. 

Among the Indians he had fought ; 

And with him many tales he brought 20 

Of pleasure and of fear ; 

Such tales as, told to any maid 

By such a youth, in the green shade. 

Were perilous to hear. 

He told of girls, a happy rout ! 25 

Who quit their fold with dance and shout, 

Their pleasant Indiap town. 

To gather strawberries all day long ; 

Returning with a choral song 

When daylight is gone down. 30 

He spake of plants that hourly change 
Their blossoms, through a boundless range 



WORDSWORTH 39 

Of intermingling hues ; 
With budding, fading, faded flowers, 
They stand the wonder of the bowers 
From morn to evening dews. 

He told of the magnolia, spread 5 

High as a cloud, high overhead ! 

The cypress and her spire ; 

— Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam 

Cover a hundred leagues, and seem 

To set the hills on fire. 10 

The youth of green savannahs spake, 

And many an endless, endless lake 

With all its fairy crowds 

Of islands, that together lie 

As quietly as spots of sky 15 

Among the evening clouds. 

" How pleasant," then he said, " it were 

A fisher or a hunter there, 

In sunshine or in shade 

To wander with an easy mind, 20 

And build a household fire, and find 

A home in every glade ! 

'' What days and what bright years ! Ah me ! 

Our life were life indeed, with thee 

So pass'd in quiet bliss ; 25 

And all the while," said he, " to know 

That we were in a world of woe, 

On such an earth as this ! " 

And then he sometimes interwove 

Fond thoughts about a father's love, 30 

" For there," said he, " are spun 

Around the heart such tender ties. 

That our own children to our eyes 

Are dearer than the sun. 



40 SELECTED POEMS 

" Sweet Ruth ! and could you go with me 

My helpmate in the woods to be, 

Our shed at night to rear ; 

Or run, my own adopted bride, 

A sylvan huntress at my side, 5 

And drive the flying deer ! 

" Beloved Ruth ! " — No more he said. 

The wakeful Ruth at midnight shed 

A solitary tear : 

She thought again — and did agree lo 

With him to sail across the sea, 

And drive the flying deer. 

" And now, as fitting is and right, 

We in the church our faith will plight, 

A husband and a wife." 15 

Even so they did ; and I may say 

That to sweet Ruth that happy day 

Was more than human life. 

Through dream and vision did she sink, 

Delighted all the while to think 20 

That, on those lonesome floods 

And green savannahs, she should share 

His board with lawful joy, and bear 

His name in the wild woods. 

But, as you have before been told, 25 

This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold. 

And with his dancing crest 

So beautiful, through savage lands 

Had roam'd about, with vagrant bands 

Of Indians in the West. 30 

The wind, the tempest roaring high, 
The tumult of a tropic sky. 



WORDSWORTH 41 

Might well be dangerous food 
For him, a youth to whom was given 
So much of earth — so much of heaven, 
And such impetuous blood. 

Whatever in those climes he found 5 

Irregular in sight or sound 

Did to his mind impart 

A kindred impulse, seem'd allied 

To his own powers, and justified 

The workings of his heart, 10 

Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought, 

The beauteous forms of Nature wrought, — 

Fair trees and gorgeous flowers ; 

The breezes their own languor lent ; 

The stars had feelings, which they sent 15 

Into those favor'd bowers. 

Yet, in his worst pursuits, I ween 

That sometimes there did intervene 

Pure hopes of high intent : 

For passions link'd to forms so fair 20 

And stately, needs must have their share 

Of noble sentiment. 

But ill he lived, much evil saw. 

With men to whom no better law 

Nor better life was known ; 25 

Deliberately and undeceived 

Those wild men's vices he received, 

And gave them back his own. 

His genius and his moral frame 

Were thus impair'd, and he became 30 

The slave of low desires : 

A man who without self-control 

Would seek what the degraded soul 

Unworthily admires. 



42 SELECTED POEMS 

And yet he with no feign'd delight 

Had woo'd the maiden, day and night 

Had loved her, night and morn : 

What could he less than love a maid 

Whose heart with so much nature play'd — 5 

So kind and so forlorn ! 

Sometimes most earnestly he said, 

" O Ruth ! I have been worse than dead ; 

False thoughts, thoughts bold and vain 

Encompass'd me on every side 10 

When I, in confidence and pride, 

Had cross'd the Atlantic main. 

" Before me shone a glorious world 

Fresh as a banner bright, unfurl'd 

To music suddenly : 1 5 

I look'd upon those hills and plains. 

And seem'd as if let loose from chains 

To live at liberty ! 

" No more of this — for now, by thee, 

Dear Ruth ! more happily set free, 20 

With nobler zeal I burn ; 

My soul from darkness is released 

Like the whole sky when to the east 

The morning doth return." 

Full soon that better mind was gone ; 25 

No hope, no wish remain'd, not one, — 

They stirr'd him now no more ; 

New objects did new pleasure give, 

And once again he wish'd to live 

As lawless as before. 30 

Meanwhile, as thus with him it fared. 
They for the voyage were prepared, 



WORDSWORTH 43 

And went to the seashore : 
But, when they thither came, the youth 
Deserted his poor bride, and Ruth 
Could never find him more. 

God help thee, Ruth ! — Such pains she had 5 

That she in half a year was mad 

And in a prison housed ; 

And there, with many a doleful song 

Made of wild words, her cup of wrong 

She fearfully caroused. 10 

Yet sometimes milder hours she knew, 

Nor wanted sun, nor rain, nor dew. 

Nor pastimes of the May, 

— They all were with her in her cell ; 

And a clear brook with cheerful knell 15 

Did o'er the pebbles play. 

When Ruth three seasons thus had lain 

There came a respite to her pain ; 

She from her prison fled ; 

But of the Vagrant none took thought ; 20 

And where it liked her best she sought 

Her shelter and her bread. 

Among the fields she breathed again : 

The master-current of her brain 

Ran permanent and free ; 25 

And, coming to the banks of Tone, 

There did she rest ; and dwell alone 

Under the greenwood tree. 

The engines of her pain, the tools 

That shaped her sorrow, rocks and pools, 30 

And airs that gently stir 

The vernal leaves — she loved them still, 

Nor ever tax'd them with the ill 

Which had been done to her. 



44 SELECTED POEMS 

A barn her Winter bed supplies ; 

But, till the warmth of Summer skies 

And Summer days is gone, 

(And all do in this tale agree) 

She sleeps beneath the greenwood tree, 5 

And other home hath none. 

An innocent life, yet far astray ! 

And Ruth will, long before her day. 

Be broken down and old. 

Sore aches she needs must have ! but less 10 

Of mind, than body's wretchedness, 

From damp, and rain, and cold. 

If she is pressed by want of food 

She from her dwelling in the wood 

Repairs to a roadside ; 1 5 

And there she begs at one steep place, 

Where up and down with easy pace 

The horsemen-travelers ride. 

That oaten pipe of hers is mute 

Or thrown away : but with a flute 20 

Her loneliness she cheers ; 

This flute, made of a hemlock stalk. 

At evening in his homeward walk 

The Quantock woodman hears. 

I, too, have pass'd her on the hills 25 

Setting her little water mills 

By spouts and fountains wild — 

Such small machinery as she turn'd 

Ere she had wept, ere she had mourn'd, — 

A young and happy child ! 30 

Farewell ! and when thy days are told, 
Ill-fated Ruth ! in hallow'd mold 



WORDSWORTH 45 

Thy corpse shall buried be ; 
For thee a funeral bell shall ring, 
And all the congregation sing 
A Christian psalm for thee. 



XXXVI 

ELEGIAC STANZAS 

Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm 
Painted by Sir George Beaumont 

I was thy neighbor once, thou rugged Pile ! 
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee : 
I saw thee every day ; and all the while 
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea. 

So pure the sky, so quiet was the air ! 
So like, so very like, was day to day ! 
Whene'er I look'd, thy image still was there ; 
It trembled, but it never pass'd away. 

How perfect was the calm ! It seem'd no sleep, 
No mood, which season takes away, or brings : 
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep 
Was even the gentlest of all gentle things. 

Ah ! then — if mine had been the painter's hand 
To express what then I saw ; and add the gleam, 
The light that never was on sea or land, 
The consecration, and the Poet's dream, — 

I would have planted thee, thou hoary pile, 
Amid a world how different from this ! 
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile ; 
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. 



46 SELECTED POEMS 

Thou shouldst have seem'd a treasure house divine 
Of peaceful years ; a chronicle of heaven ; 
Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine 
The very sweetest had to thee been given. 

A picture had it been of lasting ease, 5 

Elysian quiet, without toil or strife ; 

No motion but the moving tide ; a breeze 

Or merely silent Nature's breathing life. 

Such, in the fond illusion of my heart, 

Such picture would I at that time have made ; 10 

And seen the soul of truth in every part, 

A steadfast peace that might not be betray'd. 

So once it would have been, — 't is so no more ; 

I have submitted to a new control : 

A power is gone, which nothing can restore ; 1 5 

A deep distress hath humanized my soul. 

Not for a moment could I now behold 

A smiling sea, and be what I have been : 

The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old ; 

This, which I know, I speak with mind serene. 20 

Then, Beaumont, Friend ! who would have been the friend 
If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore. 
This work of thine I blame not, but commend ; 
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore. 

't is a passionate work ! — yet wise and well, 25 
Well chosen is the spirit that is here ; 

That hulk which labors in the deadly swell, 
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear ! 

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, 

1 love to see the look with which it braves, 30 
— Cased in the unfeeling armor of old time — 

The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves. 



WORDSWORTH 47 

— Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, 
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! 
Such happiness, wherever it be known. 
Is to be pitied ; for 't is surely blind. 

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, 5 

And frequent sights of what is to be borne ! 
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here : — 
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. 



GLEN-ALMAIN, OR THE NARROW GLEN 

In this still place, remote from men, 
Sleeps Ossian, in the Narrow Glen ; 10 

In this still place, where murmurs on 
But one meek streamlet, only one : 
He sang of battles, and the breath 
Of stormy war, and violent death ; 

And should, methinks, when all was past, 1 5 

Have rightfully been laid at last 
Where rocks were rudely heap'd, and rent 
As by a spirit turbulent ; 

Where sights were rough, and sounds were wild, 
And everything unreconciled ; 20 

In some complaining, dim retreat, 
. For fear and melancholy meet ; 
But this is calm ; there cannot be 
A more entire tranquillity. 

Does then the Bard sleep here indeed? 25 

Or is it but a groundless creed ? 
What matters it ? — I blame them not 
Whose fancy in this lonely spot 
Was moved ; and in such way express'd 
Their notion of its perfect rest. 30 



48 SELECTED POEMS 

A convent, even a hermit's cell, 

Would break the silence of this Dell : 

It is not quiet, is not ease ; 

But something deeper far than these : 

The separation that is here 

Is of the grave ; and of austere 

Yet happy feelings of the dead : 

And, therefore, was it rightly said 

That Ossian, last of all his race ! 

Lies buried in this lonely place. 



The World is too much with us ; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ; 
Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, 15 

The winds that will be howling at all hours 
And are upgather'd now like sleeping flowers, 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; 

It moves us not. — Great God ! I 'd rather be 

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, — 20 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea. 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 

XXXIX 

INSIDE OF KING'S COLLEGE CHAPEL, CAMBRIDGE 

Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense, 25 

With ill-match'd aims the Architect who plann'd 

(Albeit laboring for a scanty band 

Of white-robed Scholars only) this immense 



WORDSWORTH 49 

And glorious work of fine intelligence ! 

— Give all thou canst : high Heaven rejects the lore 

Of nicely calculated less or more : — 

So deem'd the man who fashion'd for the sense 

These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof 5 

Self-poised, and scoop'd into ten thousand cells 
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells 

Lingering — and wandering on as loth to die ; 

Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof 

That they were born for immortality. 10 



XL 

THE TWO APRIL MORNINGS 

We walk'd along, while bright and red 
Uprose the morning sun ; 
And Matthew stopp'd, he look'd, and said 
" The will of God be done ! " 

A village schoolmaster was he, 15 

With hair of glittering gray ; 
As blithe a man as you could see 
On a spring holiday. 

And on that morning, through the grass 

And by the steaming rills 20 



We traveled merrily, to pass 
A day among the hills. 



" Our work," said I, '' was well begun ; 

Then, from thy breast what thought, 

Beneath so beautiful a sun, 25 

So sad a sigh has brought.? " 



50 SELECTED POEMS 

A second time did Matthew stop ; 
And fixing still his eye 
Upon the eastern mountain top, 
To me he made reply : 

" Yon cloud with that long purple cleft 5 

Brings fresh into my mind 

A day like this, which I have left 

Full thirty years behind, 

" And just above yon slope of corn 

Such colors, and no other, 10 

Were in the sky that April morn. 

Of this the very brother. 

" With rod and line I sued the sport 

Which that sweet season gave. 

And to the churchyard come, stopp'd short 15 

Beside my daughter's grave. 

" Nine summers had she scarcely seen, 

The pride of all the vale ; 

And then she sang, — she would have been 

A very nightingale. 20 

" Six feet in earth my Emma lay ; 
And yet I loved her more — 
For so it seem'd — than till that day 
I e'er had loved before. 

" And turning from her grave, I met, 25 

Beside the churchyard yew, 

A blooming Girl, whose hair was wet 

With points of morning dew. 

" A basket on her head she bare ; 

Her brow was smooth and white : 30 

To see a child so very fair, 

It was a pure delight ! 



WORDSWORTH 51 

"No fountain from its rocky cave 
E'er tripp'd with foot so free ; 
She seem'd as happy as a wave 
That dances on the sea. 

" There came from me a sigh of pain 5 

Which I could ill confine ; 

I look'd at her, and look'd again : 

And did not wish her mine ! " 

— Matthew is in his grave, yet now 

Methinks I see him stand 10 

As at that moment, with a bough 

Of wilding in his hand. 



XLI 

THE FOUNTAIN 

A Conversation 

We talk'd with open heart, and tongue 
Affectionate and true, 

A pair of friends, though I was young, 15 

And Matthew seventy-two. 

We lay beneath a spreading oak, 

Beside a mossy seat ; 

And from the turf a fountain broke 

And gurgled at our feet. 20 

" Now, Matthew ! " said I, " let us match 
This water's pleasant tune 
With some old border-song, or catch 
That suits a summer's noon ; 

" Or of the church clock and the chimes 25 

Sing here beneath the shade 

That half-mad thing of witty rhymes 

Which you last April made ! " 



52 



SELECTED POEMS 

In silence Matthew lay, and eyed 
The spring beneath the tree ; 
And thus the dear old man replied, 
The gray-hair'd man of glee : 

" No check, no stay, this Streamlet fears, 5 

How merrily it goes ! 

'T will murmur on a thousand years 

And flow as now it flows. 

" And here, on this delightful day, 

I cannot choose but think 10 

How oft, a vigorous man, I lay 

Beside this fountain's brink. 

" My eyes are dim with childish tears, 

My heart is idly stirr'd, 

For the same sound is in my ears 15 

Which in those days I heard. 

" Thus fares it still in our decay : 

And yet the wiser mind 

Mourns less for what Age takes away, 

Than what it leaves behind. 20 

" The blackbird amid leafy trees, 
The lark above the hill. 
Let loose their carols when they please. 
Are quiet when they will. 

" With Nature never do they wage 25 

A foolish strife ; they see 

A happy youth, and their old age 

Is beautiful and free : 

" But we are press'd by heavy laws ; 

And often, glad no more, 30 

We wear a face of joy, because 

We have been glad of yore. 



WORDSWORTH 53 

" If there be one who need bemoan 

His kindred laid in earth, 

The household hearts that were his own, — 

It is the man of mirth. 

" My days, my friend, are almost gone, 5 

My life has been approved. 
And many love me ; but by none 
Am I enough beloved." 

" Now both himself and me he wrongs. 

The man who thus complains ! 10 

I live and sing my idle songs 

Upon these happy plains : 

" And Matthew, for thy children dead 

I '11 be a son to thee ! " 

At this he grasp'd my hand and said, 15 

" Alas ! that cannot be." 

— We rose up from the fountain side ; 

And down the smooth descent 

Of the green sheep track did we glide ; 

And through the wood we went ; 20 

And ere we came to Leonard's rock 
He sang those witty rimes 
About the crazy old church clock, 
And the bewilder'd chimes. 



XLII 

THE TROSACHS 

There 's not a nook within this solemn Pass, 25 

But were an apt confessional for One 

Taught by his summer spent, his autumn gone. 

That Life is but a tale of morning grass 



54 SELECTED POEMS 

Wither'd at eve. From scenes of art which chase 
That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes 
Feed it 'mid Nature's old felicities. 
Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass 

Untouch'd, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy quest, 5 

If from a golden perch of aspen spray 
(October's workmanship to rival May), 

The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast 

That moral sweeten by a heaven-taught lay, 

Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest ! 10 



XLIII 

My heart leaps up when I behold 

A rainbow in the sky : 
So was it when my life began, 
So is it now I am a man, 
So be it when I shall grow old 15 

Or let me die ! 
The Child is father of the Man : 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety. 



ODE 

Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of 
Early Childhood 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 20 
The earth, and every common sight 
To me did seem 
Apparel'd in celestial light, 
The glory and the freshness of a dream. 



WORDSWORTH 55 

It is not now as it hath been of yore ; — 
Turn wheresoe'er I may, 
By night or day, 
The things which I have seen I now can see no more. 

The rainbow comes and goes, 5 

And lovely is the rose ; 

The moon doth with delight 
Look round her when the heavens are bare ; 

Waters on a starry night 

Are beautiful and fair ; 10 

The sunshine is a glorious birth ; 
But yet I know, where'er I go. 
That there hath past away a glory from the earth. 

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song, 

And while the young lambs bound 1 5 

As to the tabor's sound. 
To me alone there came a thought of grief : 
A timely utterance gave that thought relief, 

And I again am strong. 
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep ; — 20 

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong : 
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng, 
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep, 
And all the earth is gay; 

Land and sea 25 

Give themselves up to jollity, 

And with the heart of May 
Doth every beast keep holiday ; — 
Thou child of joy, 
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy 30 

Shepherd boy ! 

Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call 

Ye to each other make ; I see 
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee ; 



56 SELECTED POEMS 

My heart is at your festival, 
My head hath its coronal, 
The fullness of your bliss, I feel — I feel it all. 
Oh evil day ! if I were sullen 
While Earth herself is adorning 5 

This sweet May morning ; 
And the children are culling 

On every side 
In a thousand valleys far and wide, 
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm, 10 

And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm : — 
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear ! 
— But there 's a tree, of many, one, 
A single field which I have look'd upon, 
Both of them speak of something that is gone : 1 5 

The pansy at my feet 
Doth the same tale repeat : 
Whither is fled the visionary gleam ? 
Where is it now, the glory and the dream ? 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;- 20 

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And Cometh from afar ; 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 25 

But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God, who is our home : 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! 
Shades of the prison house begin to close 

Upon the growing Boy, 30 

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows. 

He sees it in his joy ; 
The Youth, who daily farther from the east 
Must travel, still is Nature's priest, 

And by the vision splendid 35 

Is on his way attended ; 



WORDSWORTH 57 

At length the Man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day. 

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own ; 
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, 
And, even with something of a mother's mind 5 

And no unworthy aim. 
The homely nurse doth all she can 
To make her foster child, her inmate, Man, 

Forget the glories he hath known, 
And that imperial palace whence he came. 10 

Behold the Child among his newborn blisses, 

A six years' darling of a pigmy size ! 

See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies. 

Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses, 

With light upon him from his father's eyes ! 15 

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, 

Some fragment from his dream of human life, 

Shaped by himself with newly learned art ; 

A wedding or a festival, 

A mourning or a funeral ; 20 

And this hath now his heart, 

And unto this he frames his song : 
Then will he fit his tongue 
To dialogues of business, love, or strife ; 

But it will not be long 25 

Ere this be thrown aside. 

And with new joy and pride 
The little actor cons another part ; 
Filling from time to time his '' humorous stage '' 
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, - 3° 

That life brings with her in her equipage ; 

As if his whole vocation 

Were endless imitation. 

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie 

Thy soul's immensity ; 35 



58 SELECTED POEMS 

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep 
Thy heritage, thou eye among the bhnd, 
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, 
Haunted forever by the eternal Mind, — 

Mighty Prophet ! Seer blest ! 5 

On whom those truths do rest 
Which we are toiling all our lives to find, 
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave ; 
Thou, over whom thy Immortality 

Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave, 10 

A Presence which is not to be put by ; 
Thou litde child, yet glorious in the might 
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height. 
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke 
The years to bring the inevitable yoke, 15 

Thus bhndly with thy blessedness at strife ? 
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight. 
And custom lie upon thee with a weight 
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life ! 

O joy ! that in our embers 20 

Is something that doth live. 
That Nature yet remembers 
What was so fugitive ! 
The thought of our past years in me doth breed 
Perpetual benediction : not indeed 25 

For that which is most worthy to be blest. 
Delight and liberty, the simple creed 
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest. 
With new-fliedged hope still fluttering in his breast : — 

Not for these I raise 30 

The song of thanks and praise ; 
But for those obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things. 
Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
Blank misgivings of a creature 35 



WORDSWORTH 59 

Moving about in worlds not realized, 
High instincts, before which our mortal nature 
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised : 
But for those first affections. 

Those shadowy recollections, 5 

Which, be they what they may. 
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, 
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing ; 

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 10 

Of the eternal Silence : truths that wake, 

To perish never ; 
Which neither Hstlessness, nor mad endeavor, 

Nor man nor boy. 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 15 

Can utterly abolish or destroy ! 

Hence, in a season of calm weather 
Though inland far we be. 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 

Which brought us hither ; 20 

Can in a moment travel thither — 
And see the children sport upon the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 

Then, sing ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song ! 

And let the young lambs bound 25 

As to the tabor's sound ! 
We in thought will join your throng. 

Ye that pipe and ye that play. 

Ye that through your hearts to-day 

Feel the gladness of the May ! 30 

What though the radiance which was once so bright 
Be now forever taken from my sight, 

Though nothing can bring back the hour 
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower ; 

We will grieve not, rather find 35 

Strength in what remains behind ; 



6o SELECTED POEMS 

In the primal sympathy 
Which having been must ever be ; 
In the soothing thoughts that spring 
Out of human suffering ; 
In the faith that looks through death, 
In years that bring the philosophic mind. 

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, 

Forebode not any severing of our loves ! 

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might ; 

I only have relinquish'd one delight 

To live beneath your more habitual sway. 

I love the brooks which down their channels fret, 

Even more than when I tripp'd lighdy as they ; 

The innocent brightness of a newborn day 

Is lovely yet ; 
The clouds that gather round the setting sun 
Do take a sober coloring from an eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality ; 
Another race hath been, and other palms are won. 
Thanks to the human heart by which we live. 
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, 
To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 




rjy 






SELECTED POEMS OF SHELLEY 



XLV 

THE INDIAN SERENADE 

I arise from dreams of Thee 

In the first sweet sleep of night, 

When the winds are breathing low, 

And the stars are shining bright : 

I arise from dreams of thee, 5 

And a spirit in my feet 

Hath led me — who knows how ? 

To thy chamber window, Sweet ! 

The wandering airs, they faint 

On the dark, the silent stream — lo 

The champac odors fail 

Like sweet thoughts in a dream ; 

The nightingale's complaint, 

It dies upon her heart. 

As I must die on thine, I5 

Oh, beloved as thou art ! 

Oh lift me from the grass ! 
I die, I faint, I fail ! 
Let thy Love in kisses rain 

On my lips and eyelids pale. 20 

My cheek is cold and white, alas ! 
My heart beats loud and fast ; 
Oh ! press it close to thine again, 
Where it will break at last. 
61 



62 SELECTED POEMS 



I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden 
Thou needest not fear mine ; 
My spirit is too deeply laden 
Ever to burden thine. 



I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion ; 
Thou needest not fear mine ; 
Innocent is the heart's devotion 
With which I worship thine. 



LOVE'S PHILOSOPHY 

The fountains mingle with the river 
And the rivers with the ocean, 
The winds of heaven mix forever 
With a sweet emotion ; 
Nothing in the world is single, 
All things by a law divine 
In one another's being mingle — 
Why not I with thine ? 

See the mountains kiss high heaven, 
And the waves clasp one another ; 
No sister flower would be forgiven 
If it disdain'd its brother : 
And the sunlight clasps the earth. 
And the moonbeams kiss the sea — 
What are all these kissings worth, 
If thou kiss not me? 



SHELLEY 63 

XLVIII 

TO NIGHT 

Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, 

Spirit of Night ! 
Out of the misty eastern cave, 
Where, all the long and lone daylight, 
Thou wo vest dreams of joy and fear 5 

Which make thee terrible and dear, — 

Swift be thy flight ! 

Wrap thy form in a mantle gray. 

Star-inwrought ; 
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day, 10 

Kiss her until she be wearied out : 
Then wander o'er city and sea and land. 
Touching all with thine opiate wand — 
Come, long-sought ! 

When I arose and saw the dawn, 15 

I sigh'd for thee ; 
When light rode high, and the dew was gone. 
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree. 
And the weary Day turn'd to his rest 
Lingering like an unloved guest, 20 

I sigh'd for thee. 

Thy brother Death came, and cried, 

Wouldst thou me ? 
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed. 
Murmur' d like a noontide bee 25 

Shall I nestle near thy side ? 
Wouldst thou me ? — and I replied, 

No, not thee ! 

Death will come when thou art dead, 

Soon, too soon — 3° 

Sleep will come when thou art fled ; 



64 SELECTED POEMS 

Of neither would I ask the boon 
I ask of thee, beloved Night — 
Swift be thine approaching flight, 
Come soon, soon ! 

XLIX 

When the lamp is shatter'd 5 

The light in the dust lies dead — 

When the cloud is scatter'd. 

The rainbow's glory is shed. 

When the lute is broken. 

Sweet tones are remember'd not ; 10 

When the lips have spoken, 

Loved accents are soon forgot. 

As music and splendor 

Survive not the lamp and the lute, 

The heart's echoes render 15 

No song when the spirit is mute — 

No song but sad dirges, 

Like the wind through a ruin'd cell. 

Or the mournful surges 

That ring the dead seaman's knell. 20 

When hearts have once mingled, 

Love first leaves the well-built nest ; 

The weak one is singled 

To endure what it once possesst. 

O Love ! who bewailest 25 

The frailty of all things here. 

Why choose you the frailest 

For your cradle, your home, and your bier ? 

Its passions will rock thee 

As the storms rock the ravens on high ; 30 

Bright reason will mock thee 

Like the sun from a wintry sky. 



SHELLEY 65 



From thy nest every rafter 
Will rot, and thine eagle home 
Leave thee naked to laughter, 
When leaves fall and cold winds come. 



One word is too often profaned 5 

For me to profane it. 
One feeling too falsely disdain'd 

For thee to disdain it. 
One hope is too like despair 

For prudence to smother, 10 

And pity from thee more dear 

Than that from another. 

I can give not what men call love ; 

But wilt thou accept not 
The worship the heart lifts above 15 

And the Heavens reject not : 
The desire of the moth for the star, 

Of the night for the morrow, 
The devotion to something afar 

From the sphere of our sorrow 1 20 

LI 

STANZAS WRITTEN IN DEJECTION NEAR NAPLES 

The sun is warm, the sky is clear. 
The waves are dancing fast and bright, 
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear 
The purple noon's transparent might : 
The breath of the moist earth is light 25 

Around its unexpanded buds ; 
Like many a voice of one delight, 
The winds, the birds, the ocean-floods. 
The city's voice itself is soft like Solitude's. 



66 SELECTED POEMS 

I see the deep's untrampled floor 
With green and purple seaweeds strown ; 
I see the waves upon the shore 
Like Ught dissolved in star-showers, thrown : 
I sit upon the sands alone ; 5 

The lightning of the noontide ocean 
Is flashing round me, and a tone 
Arises from its measured motion — 
How sweet ! did any heart now share in my emotion. 

Alas! I have nor hope nor health, 10 

Nor peace within nor calm around, 
Nor that content, surpassing wealth, 
The sage in meditation found. 
And walk'd with inward glory crown'd — 
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure ; 1 5 

Others I see whom these surround — 
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure ; 
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. 

Yet now despair itself is mild 

Even as the winds and waters are ; 20 

I could He down like a tired child, 
And weep away the life of care 
Which I have borne, and yet must bear, — 
Till death like sleep might steal on me, 
And I might feel in the warm air 25 

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. 

LII 
TO A SKYLARK 

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit ! 

Bird thou never wert, 
That from heaven, or near it 30 

Pourest thy full heart 
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 



SHELLEY 67 

Higher still and higher 

From the earth thou springest, 
Like a cloud of fire ; 

The blue deep thou wingest, 
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 5 

In the golden lightning 

Of the sunken sun 
O'er which clouds are brightening, 

Thou dost float and run, 
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. 10 

The pale purple even 

Melts around thy flight ; 
Like a star of heaven 
In the broad daylight 
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight : 15 

Keen as are the arrows 

Of that silver sphere. 
Whose intense lamp narrows 

In the white dawn clear 
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. 20 

All the earth and air 

With thy voice is loud, 
As, when night is bare. 
From one lonely cloud 
The moon rains out her beams and heaven is over- 

flow'd. 25 

What thou art we know not ; 

What is most like thee ? 
From rainbow clouds there flow not 
Drops so bright to see 
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody ; — 3° 



68 SELECTED POEMS 

Like a poet hidden 

In the light of thought, 
Singing hymns unbidden, 
Till the world is wrought 
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not : 5 

Like a high-born maiden 

In a palace tower, 
Soothing her love-laden 

Soul in secret hour 
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower : 10 

Like a glowworm golden 

In a dell of dew, 
Scattering unbeholden 
Its aerial hue 
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from 

the view : 1 5 

Like a rose embower'd 

In its own green leaves, 
By warm winds deflower'd. 
Till the scent it gives 
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged 

thieves. 20 

Sound of vernal showers 

On the twinkling grass, 
Rain-awaken'd flowers, 
All that ever was 
Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass. 25 

Teach us, sprite or bird, 

What sweet thoughts are thine : 
I have never heard 
Praise of love or wine 
That panted forth a flood of rapture so" divine. 30 



SHELLEY 69 

Chorus hymeneal 

Or triumphal chaunt 
Match'd with thine, would be all 

But an empty vaunt — - 
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. 5 

What objects are the fountains 

Of thy happy strain ? 
What fields, or waves, or mountains ? 
What shapes of sky or plain ? 
What love of thine own kind ? what ignorance of 

pain? 10 

With thy clear keen joyance 

Languor cannot be : 
Shadow of annoyance 
Never came near thee : 
Thou lovest ; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. 1 5 

Waking or asleep 

Thou of death must deem 
Things more true and deep 
Than we mortals dream, 
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream ? 20 

We look before and after, 

And pine for what is not : 
Our sincerest laughter 

With some pain is fraught ; 
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest 

thought. 25 

Yet if' we could scorn 

Hate, and pride, and fear ; 
If we were things born 

Not to shed a tear, 
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. 30 



70 SELECTED POEMS 

Better than all measures 

Of delightful sound, 
Better than all treasures 
That in books are found, 
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground ! 5 

Teach me half the gladness 

That thy brain must know, 
Such harmonious madness 
From my lips would flow. 
The world should listen then, as I am listening now ! 10 

LIII 

OZYMANDIAS 

I met a traveler from an antique land 

Who said : Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand. 

Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown 

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command 1 5 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things. 

The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed ; 

And on the pedestal these words appear : 

" My name is Ozymandias, king of kings : 20 

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! " 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, 

The lone and level sands stretch far away. 

LIV 

WITH A GUITAR: TO JANE 

Ariel to Miranda : — Take 25 

This slave of Music, for the sake 
Of him who is the slave of thee ; 
And teach it all the harmony 



. SHELLEY 71 

In which thou canst, and only thou, 

Make the delighted spirit glow, 

Till joy denies itself again 

And, too intense, is turn'd to pain. 

For by permission and command 5 

Of thine own Prince Ferdinand, 

Poor Ariel sends this silent token 

Of more than ever can be spoken ; 

Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who 

From life to life must still pursue 10 

Your happiness, for thus alone 

Can Ariel ever find his own. 

From Prospero's enchanted cell, 

As the mighty verses tell, 

To the throne of Naples he ^5 

Lit you o'er the trackless sea, 

Flitting on, your prow before, 

Like a living meteor. 

When you die, the silent Moon 

In her interlunar swoon 20 

Is not sadder in her cell 

Than deserted Ariel. 

When you live again on earth. 

Like an unseen Star of birth 

Ariel guides you o'er the sea 25 

Of life from your nativity : — 

Many changes have been run 

Since Ferdinand and you begun 

Your course of love, and Ariel still 

Has track'd your steps and served your will. 30 

Now in humbler, happier lot. 

This is all remember'd not ; 

And now, alas ! the poor Sprite is 

Imprison'd for some fault of his 

In a body like a grave — 35 

From you he only dares to crave. 



72 SELECTED POEMS 

For his service and his sorrow, 
A smile to-day, a song to-morrow. 

The artist who this idol wrought 

To echo all harmonious thought, 

Fell'd a tree, while on the steep 5 

The woods were in their winter sleep, 

Rock'd in that repose divine 

On the wind-swept Apennine ; 

And dreaming, some of Autumn past, 

And some of Spring approaching fast, 10 

And some of April buds and showers, 

And some of songs in July bowers, 

And all of love : And so this tree, — 

Oh, that such our death may be I — 

Died in sleep, and felt no pain, 15 

To live in happier form again : 

From which, beneath heaven's fairest star, 

The artist wrought this loved Guitar ; 

And taught it justly to reply 

To all who question skillfully 20 

In language gentle as thine own ; 

Whispering in enamor'd tone 

Sweet oracles of woods and dells, 

And summer winds in sylvan cells : 

— For it had learned all harmonies 25 

Of the plains and of the skies. 

Of the forests and the mountains. 

And the many-voiced fountains ; 

The clearest echoes of the hills. 

The softfest notes of falling rills, 30 

The melodies of birds and bees. 

The murmuring of summer seas. 

And pattering rain, and breathing dew. 

And airs of evening ; and it knew 

That seldom-heard mysterious sound 35 

Which, driven on its diurnal round, 



SHELLEY 73 



As it floats through boundless day, 
Our world enkindles on its way : 
— All this it knows, but will not tell 
To those who cannot question well 
The Spirit that inhabits it ; 
It talks according to the wit 
Of its companions ; and no more 
Is heard than has been felt before 
By those who tempt it to betray 
These secrets of an elder day. 
But, sweedy as its answers will 
Flatter hands of perfect skill. 
It keeps its highest holiest tone 
For our beloved Friend alone. 



LV 

TO JANE 

The Invitation 



Best and brightest, come away, — 1 5 

Fairer far than this fair Day, 

Which, like thee, to those in sorrow, 

Comes to bid a sweet good morrow 

To the rough year just awake 

In its cradle on the brake. 20 

The brightest hour of unborn Spring 

Through the winter wandering. 

Found, it seems, the halcyon morn 

To hoar February born ; 

Bending from heaven, in azure mirth, 25 

It kiss'd the forehead of the earth, 

And smiled upon the silent sea. 

And bade the frozen streams be free, 

And waked to music all their fountains. 

And breathed upon the frozen mountains, 30 



74 SELECTED POEMS 

And like a prophetess of May 
Strew'd flowers upon the barren way, 
Making the wintry world appear 
Like one on whom thou smilest, dear. 

Away, away, from men and towns, 5 

To the wildwood and the downs — 

To the silent wilderness 

Where the soul need not repress 

Its music, lest it should not find 

An echo in another's mind, 10 

While the touch of Nature's art 

Harmonizes heart to heart. 

Radiant Sister of the Day, 

Awake ! arise ! and come away ! 

To the wildwoods and the plains, 15 

To the pools where winter rains 

Image all their roof of leaves. 

Where the pine its garland weaves 

Of sapless green, and ivy dun. 

Round stems that never kiss the sun ; 20 

Where the lawns and pastures be 

And the sand hills of the sea ; 

Where the melting hoarfrost wets 

The daisy star that never sets. 

And windflowers and violets, 25 

Which yet join not scent to hue, 

Crown the pale year weak and new ; 

When the night is left behind 

In the deep east, dim and blind, 

And the blue noon is over us, 30 

And the multitudinous 

Billows murmur at our feet. 

Where the earth and ocean meet. 

And all things seem only one 

In the universal Sun. 35 



SHELLEY 75 

LVI 

THE RECOLLECTION 

Now the last day of many days 

All beautiful and bright as thou, 

The loveliest and the last, is dead : 

Rise, Memory, and write its praise ! 

Up — to thy wonted work ! come, trace S 

The epitaph of glory fled. 

For now the earth has changed its face, 

A frown is on the heaven's brow. 

We wander' d to the Pine Forest 

That skirts the Ocean's foam ; lo 

The lightest wind was in its nest. 

The tempest in its home. 
The whispering waves were half asleep. 

The clouds were gone to play, 
And on the bosom of the deep 15 

The smile of heaven lay ; 
It seem'd as if the hour were one 

Sent from beyond the skies, 
Which scatter'd from above the sun 

A light of Paradise ! 20 

We paused amid the pines that stood 

The giants of the waste. 
Tortured by storms to shapes as rude 

As serpents interlaced, — 
And soothed by every azure breath 25 

That under heaven is blown. 
To harmonies and hues beneath. 

As tender as its own : 
Now all the treetops lay asleep 

Like green waves on the sea, 3° 

As still as in the silent deep 

The ocean woods may be. 



76 SELECTED POEMS 

How calm it was ! — The silence there 

By such a chain was bound, 
That even the busy woodpecker 

Made stiller with her sound 
The inviolable quietness ; 5 

The breath of peace we drew 
With its soft motion made not less 

The calm that round us grew. 
There seem'd, from the remotest seat 

Of the white mountain waste 10 

To the soft flower beneath our feet, 

A magic circle traced, — 
A spirit interfused around, 

A thrilling silent life; 
To momentary peace it bound 15 

Our mortal nature's strife ; — 
And still I felt the center of 

The magic circle there 
Was one fair form that fill'd with love 

The lifeless atmosphere. 20 

We paused beside the pools that lie 

Under the forest bough ; 
Each seem'd as 't were a little sky 

Gulf 'd in a world below ; 
A firmament of purple light 25 

Which in the dark earth lay. 
More boundless than the depth of night 

And purer than the day — 
In which the lovely forests grew 

As in the upper air, 30 

More perfect both in shape and hue 

Than any spreading there. 
There lay the glade and neighboring lawn, 

And through the dark-green wood 
The white sun twinkling like the dawn 35 

Out of a speckled cloud. 



SHELLEY 



77 



Sweet views which in our world above 

Can never well be seen 
Were imaged in the water's love 

Of that fair forest green : 
And all was interfused beneath 5 

With an Elysian glow, 
An atmosphere without a breath, 

A softer day below. 
Like one beloved, the scene had lent 

To the dark water's breast 10 

Its every leaf and lineament 

With more than truth exprest ; 
Until an envious wind crept by, 

Like an unwelcome thought 
Which from the mind's too faithful eye 15 

Blots one dear image out. 
— Though thou art ever fair and kind. 

The forests ever green, 
Less oft is peace in Shelley's mind 

Than calm in waters seen ! 20 

LVII 

TO THE MOON 

Art thou pale for weariness 
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth. 

Wandering companionless 
Among the stars that have a different birth, — 
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye 25 

That finds no object worth its constancy ? 



THE QUESTION 

I dream'd that as I wander'd by the way 

Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring, 

And gentle odors led my steps astray, 

Mix'd with a sound of waters murmuring 30 



78 SELECTED POEMS 

Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay 

Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling 
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream, 
But kiss'd it and then fled, as Thou mightest in dream. 

There grew pied windfiowers and violets, 5 

Daisies, those pearl'd Arcturi of the earth, 

The constellated flower that never sets ; 

Faint oxlips ; tender bluebells, at whose birth 

The sod scarce heaved ; and that tall flower that wets — 
[Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth — J^ 10 

Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears, 

When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears. 

And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine, 
Green cowbind and the moonlight-color'd May, 

And cherry blossoms, and white cups, whose wine 15 

Was the bright dew yet drain' d not by the day ; 

And wild roses, and ivy serpentine 

With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray ; 

And flowers azure, black, and streak'd with gold. 

Fairer than any waken'd eyes behold. 20 

And nearer to the river's trembling edge 

There grew broad flag flowers, purple prank'd with white. 
And starry river buds among the sedge. 

And floating water lilies, broad and bright. 
Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge 25 

With moonlight beams of their own watery light ; 
And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green 
As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen. 

Methought that of these visionary flowers 

I made a nosegay, bound in such a way 30 

That the same hues, which in their natural bowers 

Were mingled or opposed, the like array 

1 Omitted from Palgrave's text and early editions of Shelley. Cf. Hutchinson's 
edition, p. 684. 



SHELLEY 79 

Kept these imprison'd children of the Hours 

Within my hand, — and then, elate and gay, 
I hasten'd to the spot whence I had come 
That I might there present it — O ! to Whom ? 

LIX 

LINES WRITTEN AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 

Many a green isle needs must be 5 

In the deep wide sea of Misery, 

Or the mariner, worn and wan, 

Never thus could voyage on 

Day and night, and night and day, 

Drifting on his dreary way, 10 

With the solid darkness black 

Closing round his vessel's track ; 

Whilst above, the sunless sky 

Big with clouds, hangs heavily, 

And behind, the tempest fleet 15 

Hurries on with lightning feet, 

Riving sail, and cord, and plank. 

Till the ship has almost drank 

Death from the o'erbrimming deep ; 

And sinks down, down, like that sleep 20 

When the dreamer seems to be 

Weltering through eternity ; 

And the dim low line before 

Of a dark and distant shore 

Still recedes, as ever still 25 

Longing with divided will, 

But no power to seek or shun. 

He is ever drifted on 

O'er the unreposing wave, 

To the haven of the grave. 30 

Ah, many flowering islands lie 
In the waters of wide Agony : 



8o SELECTED POEMS 

To such a one this morn was led 

My bark, by soft winds piloted. 

— 'Mid the mountains Euganean 

I stood listening to the paean 

With which the legion'd rooks did hail 5 

The Sun's uprise majestical : 

Gathering round with wings all hoar, 

1'hrough the dewy mist they soar 

Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven 

Bursts ; and then, — as clouds of even 10 

Fleck'd with fire and azure, lie 

In the unfathomable sky, — 

So their plumes of purple grain 

Starr'd with drops of golden rain 

Gleam above the sunlight woods, 15 

As in silent multitudes 

On the morning's fitful gale 

Through the broken mist they sail ; 

And the vapors cloven and gleaming 

Follow down the dark steep streaming, 20 

Till all is bright, and clear, and still 

Round the solitary hill. 

Beneath is spread like a green sea 
The waveless plain of Lombardy, 
Bounded by the vaporous air, 25 

Islanded by cities fair ; 
Underneath Day's azure eyes, 
Ocean's nursling, Venice lies, — 
A peopled labyrinth of walls, 

Amphitrite's destined halls, 30 

Which her hoary sire now paves 
With his blue and beaming waves. 
Lo ! the sun upsprings behind. 
Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined 

On the level quivering line 35 

Of the waters crystalline ; 



SHELLEY 8i 

And before that chasm of light, 

As within a furnace bright, 

Column, tower, and dome, and spire. 

Shine like obelisks of fire. 

Pointing with inconstant motion . 5 

From the altar of dark ocean 

To the sapphire-tinted skies ; 

As the flames of sacrifice 

From the marble shrines did rise 

As to pierce the dome of gold lo 

Where Apollo spoke of old. 

Sun-girt City ! thou hast been 
Ocean's child, and then his queen ; 
Now is come a darker day, 

And thou soon must be his prey, 15 

If the power that raised thee here 
Hallow so thy watery bier. 
A less drear ruin then than now, 
With thy conquest-branded brow 
Stooping to the slave of slaves 20 

From thy throne among the waves 
Wilt thou be, — when the sea mew 
Flies, as once before it flew. 
O'er thine isles depopulate, 

And all is in its ancient state, 25 

Save where many a palace gate 
With green sea flowers overgrown 
Like a rock of ocean's own. 
Topples o'er the abandon'd sea 
As the tides change sullenly. 30 

The fisher on his watery way 
Wandering at the close of day. 
Will spread his sail and seize his oar 
Till he pass the gloomy shore. 
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep, 35 

Bursting o'er the starlight deep. 



82 SELECTED POEMS 

Lead a rapid mask of death 
O'er the waters of his path. 



Noon descends around me now : 
'T is the noon of autumn's glow, 
When a soft and purple mist 5 

Like a vaporous amethyst, 
Or an air-dissolved star 
Mingling light and fragrance, far 
From the curved horizon's bound 
To the point of heaven's profound, 10 

Fills the overflowing sky ; 
And the plains that silent lie 
Underneath ; the leaves unsodden 
Where the infant Frost has trodden 
With his morning-winged feet 15 

Whose bright print is gleaming yet ; 
And the red and golden vines 
Piercing with their trellised lines 
The rough, dark-skirted wilderness ; 
The dun and bladed grass no less, 20 

Pointing from this hoary tower 
In the windless air ; the flower 
Glimmering at my feet ; the line 
Of the olive-sandal'd Apennine 
In the south dimly islanded ; 25 

And the Alps, whose snows are spread 
High between the clouds and sun ; 
And of living things each one ; 
And my spirit, which so long 

Darken'd this swift stream of song, — 30 

Interpenetrated lie 
By the glory of the sky ; 
Be it love, light, harmony, 
Odor, or the soul of all 
Which from heaven Uke dew doth fall, 35 



SHELLEY 83 

Or the mind which feeds this verse, 
Peopling the lone universe. 

Noon descends, and after noon 
Autumn's evening meets me soon. 
Leading the infantine moon 5 

And that one star, which to her 
Almost seems to minister 
Half the crimson light she brings 
From the sunset's radiant springs : 
And the soft dreams of the morn 10 

(Which like winged winds had borne 
To that silent isle, which lies 
'Mid remember'd agonies, 
The frail bark of this lone being), 
Pass, to other sufferers fleeing, 15 

And its ancient pilot, Pain, 
Sits beside the helm again. 

Other flowering isles must be 
In the sea of Life and Agony : 
Other spirits float and flee 20 

O'er that gulf : ev'n now, perhaps. 
On some rock the wild wave wraps. 
With folded wings they waiting sit 
For my bark, to pilot it 

To some calm and blooming cove ; 25 

Where for me, and those I love, 
May a windless bower be built. 
Far from passion, pain, and guilt. 
In a dell 'mid lawny hills 

Which the wild sea murmur fills, 30 

And soft sunshine, and the sound 
Of old forests echoing round, 
And the light and smell divine 
Of all flowers that breathe and shine, 



84 SELECTED POEMS 



— We may live so happy there, 

That the Spirits of the Air 

Envying us, may ev'n entice 

To our healing paradise 

The polluting multitude : 5 

But their rage would be subdued 

By that clime divine and calm. 

And the winds whose wings rain balm 

On the uplifted soul, and leaves 

Under which the bright sea heaves; 10 

While each breathless interval 

In their whisperings musical 

The inspired soul supplies 

With its own deep melodies ; 

And the Love which heals all strife 1 5 

Circling, like the breath of life. 

All things in that sweet abode 

With its own mild brotherhood : — 

They, not it, would change ; and soon 

Every sprite beneath the moon 20 

Would repent its envy vain, 

And the Earth grow young again. 



LX 

ODE TO THE WEST WIND 

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, 

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, 25 

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red. 

Pestilence-stricken multitudes ! O thou 

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed 

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, 

Each like a corpse within its grave, until 30 

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow 



SHELLEY 85 

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) 

With living hues and odors plain and hill : 

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere ; 

Destroyer and Preserver ; hear, oh, hear ! 5 

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion. 
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, 
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean, 
Angels of rain and lightning ! there are spread 
On the blue surface of thine airy surge, 10 

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 
Of some fierce Maenad, ev'n from the dim verge 
Of the horizon to the zenith's height — 
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge 
Of the dying year, to which this closing night 15 

Will be the dome of a vast sepulcher, 
Vaulted with all thy congregated might 
Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere 
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst : oh, hear ! 

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams 20 

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams. 
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay. 
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers 
Quivering within the wave's intenser day, 25 

All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers 
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them ! Thou 
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers 
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below 
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear 30 

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear 
And tremble and despoil themselves : oh, hear ! 



86 SELECTED POEMS 

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear ; 
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee ; 
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 
The impulse of thy strength, only less free 
Than Thou, O uncontrollable ! If even 5 

I were as in my boyhood, and could be 
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven. 
As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed 
Scarce seem'd a vision, — I would ne'er have striven 
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. 10 

Oh ! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud ! 
I fall upon the thorns of life ! I bleed ! 
A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd 
One too like thee — tameless, and swift, and proud. 

Make me thy lyre, ev'n as the forest is : 15 

What if my leaves are falling like its own ! 
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, 
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce. 
My spirit ! be thou me, impetuous one ! 20 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe. 
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth : 
And, by the incantation of this verse, 
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth 
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind ! 25 

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth 
The trumpet of a prophecy ! O Wind, 
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 

LXI 

On a Poet's lips I slept 

Dreaming like a love-adept 30 

In the sound his breathing kept ; 

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, 

But feeds on the aerial kisses 

Of shapes that haunt Thought's wildernesses. 



SHELLEY 87 

He will watch from dawn to gloom 
The lake-reflected sun illume 
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, 

Nor heed nor see what things they be — 
But from these create he can 5 

Forms more real than living Man, 

Nurslings of Immortality ! 



Lxn 
A DIRGE 

Rough wind, that moanest loud 

Grief too sad for song ; 
Wild wind, when sullen cloud 10 

Knells all the night long ; 
Sad storm whose tears are vain, 
Bare woods whose branches stain, 
Deep caves and dreary main, — 

Wail for the world's wrong. 15 

LXIII 

A LAMENT 

O World ! O Life ! O Time ! 
On whose last steps I climb, 

Trembling at that where I had stood before ; 
When will return the glory of your prime ? 

No more — oh, nevermore ! 20 

Out of the day and night 
A joy has taken flight : 

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar 
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight 

No more — oh, nevermore ! 25 



88 SELECTED POEMS 



LXIV 



Music, when soft voices die, 
Vibrates in the memory — • 
Odors, when sweet violets sicken, 
Live within the sense they quicken. 

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, 
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed ; 
And so thy thoughts, when Thou art gone, 
Love itself shall slumber on. 



SELECTED POEMS OF KEATS 



ODE 

Bards of Passion and of Mirth, 
Ye have left your souls on earth ! 
Have ye souls in heaven too, 
Double-lived in regions new? 

— Yes, and those of heaven commune 5 

With the spheres of sun and moon ; 

With the noise of fountains wond'rous 

And the parle of voices thund'rous ; 

With the whisper of heaven's trees 

And one another, in soft ease lo 

Seated on Elysian lawns 

Browsed by none but Dian's fawns ; 

Underneath large bluebells tented. 

Where the daisies are rose-scented, 

And the rose herself has got 15 

Perfume which on earth is not ; 

Where the nightingale doth sing 

Not a senseless, tranced thing. 

But divine melodious truth ; 

Philosophic numbers smooth ; 20 

Tales and golden histories 

Of heaven and its mysteries. 

Thus ye live on high, and then 
On the earth ye live again ; 
89 



9© SELECTED POEMS 

And the souls ye left behind you 

Teach us, here, the way to find you, 

Where your other souls are joying, 

Never slumber'd, never cloying. 

Here, your earthborn souls still speak 5 

To mortals, of their little week ; 

Of their sorrows and delights ; 

Of their passions and their spites ; 

Of their glory and their shame ; 

What doth strengthen and what maim : — 10 

Thus ye teach us, every day, 

Wisdom, though fled far away. 

Bards of Passion and of Mirth 
Ye have left your souls on earth ! 
Ye have souls in heaven too, 15 

Double-lived in regions new ! 

LXVI 

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER 

Much have I travel'd in the realms of gold 

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ; 

Round many western islands have I been 

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 20 

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne : 

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold : 

— Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 25 

When a new planet swims into his ken ; 
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes 

He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — 

Silent, upon a peak in Darien. 30 



KEATS 91 



LXVII 



In a drear-nighted December, 

Too happy, happy tree, 

Thy branches ne'er remember 

Their green felicity : 

The north cannot undo them 

With a sleety whistle through them, 

Nor frozen thawings glue them 

From budding at the prime. 

In a drear-nighted December, 
Too happy, happy brook. 
Thy bubblings ne'er remember 
Apollo's summer look ; 
But with a sweet forgetting 
They stay their crystal fretting. 
Never, never petting 
About the frozen time. 

Ah ! would 't were so with many 
A gentle girl and boy ! 
But were there ever any 
Writhed not at passed joy ? 
To know the change and feel it, 
When there is none to heal it 
Nor numbed sense to steal it — 
Was never said in rhyme. 



LXVIII 

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI 

" O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 25 

Alone and palely loitering ? 
The sedge has wither' d from the lake, 

And no birds sing. 



92 SELECTED POEMS 

" O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms ! 

So haggard and so woebegone ? 
The squirrel's granary is full, 

And the harvest 's done. 

" I see a lily on thy brow 5 

With anguish moist and fever-dew. 

And on thy cheeks a fading rose 
Fast withereth too." 

" I met a lady in the meads. 

Full beautiful — a faery's child, 10 

Her hair was long, her foot was light, 

And her eyes were wild. 

" I made a garland for her head, 

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone ; 

She look'd at me as she did love, 1 5 

And made sweet moan. 

" I set her on my pacing steed 

And nothing else saw all day long, 

For sidelong would she bend, and sing 

A faery's song. 20 

" She found me roots of relish sweet, 

And honey wild and manna-dew, 
And sure in language strange she said 

' I love thee true.' 

" She took me to her elfin grot, 25 

And there she wept and sigh'd full sore ; 

And there I shut her wild wild eyes 
With kisses four. 

" And there she lulled me asleep. 

And there I dream'd — Ah ! woe betide ! 30 

The latest dream I ever dream'd 

On the cold hill's side. 



KEATS 93 

" I saw pale kings and princes too, 

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all : 
They cried — ' La belle Dame sans Merci 

Hath thee in thrall ! ' 

" I saw their starved lips in the gloam 5 

With horrid warning gaped wide, 
And I awoke and found me here 

On the cold hill's side. 

" And this is why I sojourn here 

Alone and palely loitering, 10 

Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake, 

And no birds sing." 



LXIX 

Bright Star ! would I were steadfast as thou art — 
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night. 
And watching, with eternal lids apart, 1 5 

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, 

The moving waters at their priestlike task 

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores. 

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask 

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors : — 20 

No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, 
Pillow'd upon my fair Love's ripening breast 
To feel forever its soft fall and swell. 
Awake forever in a sweet unrest ; 

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, 25 

And so live ever, — or else swoon to death. 



94 SELECTED POEMS 

LXX 

When I have fears that I may cease to be 
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, 
Before high-piled books, in charact'ry 
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain ; 

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, 5 

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, 
And think that I may never live to trace 
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance ; 

And when I feel, fair Creature of an hour ! 

That I shall never look upon thee more, lo 

Never have relish in the faery power 

Of unreflecting love — then on the shore 

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think 
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink. 

LXXI 

LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN 

Souls of Poets dead and gone, 15 

What Elysium have ye known, 

Happy field or mossy cavern. 

Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern ? 

Have ye tippled drink more fine 

Than mine host's Canary wine ? 20 

Or are fruits of Paradise 

Sweeter than those dainty pies 

Of venison ? O generous food ! 

Dressed as though bold Robin Hood 

Would, with his Maid Marian, 25 

Sup and bowse from horn and can. 



I have heard that on a day 
Mine host's signboard flew away 



KEATS 95 



Nobody knew whither, till 

An astrologer's old quill 

To a sheepskin gave the story, 

Said he saw you in your glory, 

Underneath a new-old sign 

Sipping beverage divine. 

And pledging with contented smack 

The Mermaid in the Zodiac. 

Souls of Poets dead and gone, 
What Elysium have ye known, 
Happy field or mossy cavern, 
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern ? 



ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE 



My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains 

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk. 
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains 1 5 

One minute past, and Lethe- wards had sunk : 
'T is not through envy of thy happy lot, 
But being too happy in thine happiness, — 
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees. 

In some melodious plot 20 

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, 
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 

O, for a draft of vintage ! that hath been 

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, 
Tasting of Flora and the country green, 25 

Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburned mirth ! 
O for a beaker full of the warm South, 
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, 
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, 

And purple-stained mouth ; 3° 

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, 
And with thee fade away into the forest dim : 



96 - SELECTED POEMS 

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget 

What thou among the leaves hast never known, 
The weariness, the fever, and the fret 

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan ; 
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, 5 

Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies ; 
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 
And leaden-eyed despairs ; 
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, 

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. lo 

Away ! away ! for I will fly to thee, 

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, 
But on the viewless wings of Poesy, 

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards : 

Already with thee ! tender is the night, 1 5 

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, 

Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays ; 

But here there is no light. 

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown 

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 20 

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs. 
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet 

Wherewith the seasonable month endows 
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 25 

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine ; 
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves ; 
And mid-May's eldest child. 
The coming musk rose, full of dewy wine. 

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 30 

Darkling I listen ; and for many a time 

I have been half in love with easeful Death, 

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, 
To take into the air my quiet breath ; 



KEATS 97 

Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 
To cease upon the midnight with no pain, 
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad 
In such an ecstasy ! 
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain — 5 

To thy high requiem become a sod. 

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird ! 

No hungry generations tread thee down ; 
The voice I hear this passing night was heard 

In ancient days by emperor and clown : lo 

Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path 

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, 
She stood in tears amid the alien corn ; 
The same that ofttimes hath 
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam 15 

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 

Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell 

To toll me back from thee to my sole self ! 
Adieu ! the fancy cannot cheat so well 

As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. 20 

Adieu ! adieu ! thy plaintive anthem fades 
Past the near meadows, over the still stream. 
Up the hillside ; and now 't is buried deep 
In the next valley glades : 
Was it a vision, or a waking dream ? 25 

Fled is that music : — Do I wake or sleep ? 



LXXIII 

To one who has been long in city pent, 

'T is very sweet to look into the fair 

And open face of heaven, — to breathe a prayer 

Full in the smile of the blue firmament. 30 



98 SELECTED POEMS 

Who is more happy, when, with heart's content, 
Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair 
Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair 
And gentle tale of love and languishment ? 

Returning home at evening, with an ear 
Catching the notes of Philomel, — an eye 
Watching the sailing cloudlet's bright career, 

He mourns that day so soon has glided by : 
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear 
That falls through the clear ether silently. 



TO AUTUMN 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. 

Close bosom friend of the maturing sun ; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

With fruit the vines that round the thatch eaves run ; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, 15 

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core ; 

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

With a sweet kernel ; to set budding more. 

And still more, later flowers for the bees. 

Until they think warm days will never cease ; 20 

For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells.' 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store ? 

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find 

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor. 

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind ; 25 

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep. 

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers : 

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep 



KEATS 99 

Steady thy laden head across a brook ; 
Or by a cider press, with patient look, 
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. 

Where are the songs of Spring ? Ay, where are they ? 

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, — 5 

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day 

And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue ; 

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 

Among the river sallows, borne aloft 

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies ; 10 

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn ; 

Hedge crickets sing ; and now with treble soft 

The redbreast whistles from a garden croft ; 

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. 

LXXV 

FANCY 

Ever let the Fancy roam ; 1 5 

Pleasure never is at home : 

At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth, 

Like to bubbles when rain pelteth ; 

Then let winged Fancy wander 

Through the thought still spread beyond her : 20 

Open wide the mind's cage-door. 

She '11 dart forth, and cloudward soar. 

O sweet Fancy ! let her loose ; 

Summer's joys are spoiled by use, 

And the enjoying of the Spring 25 

Fades as does its blossoming; 

Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too. 

Blushing through the mist and dew, 

Cloys with tasting : What do then ? 

Sit thee by the ingle, when 30 

The sear fagot blazes bright, 

Spirit of a winter's night ; 



SELECTED POEMS 

When the soundless earth is muffled, 

And the caked snow is shuffled 

From the plowboy's heavy shoon ; 

When the Night doth meet the Noon 

In a dark conspiracy 5 

To banish Even from her sky. 

Sit thee there, and send abroad. 

With a mind self-overaw'd, 

Fancy, high-commission'd : — send her ! 

She has vassals to attend her : 10 

She will bring, in spite of frost, 

Beauties that the earth hath lost ; 

She will bring thee, all together. 

All delights of summer weather ; 

All the buds and bells of May, 15 

From dewy sward or thorny spray ; 

All the heaped Autumn's wealth. 

With a still, mysterious stealth : 

She will mix these pleasures up 

Like three fit wines in a cup, 20 

And thou shalt quaff it : — thou shalt hear 

Distant harvest carols clear ; 

Rustle of the reaped corn ; 

Sweet birds antheming the morn : 

And, in the same moment — hark ! 25 

'T is the early April lark. 

Or the rooks, with busy caw. 

Foraging for sticks and straw. 

Thou shalt, at one glance, behold 

The daisy and the marigold ; 30 

White-plumed lilies, and the first 

Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst; 

Shaded hyacinth, alway 

Sapphire queen of the mid-May ; 

And every leaf, and every flower 35 

Pearled with the selfsame shower. 



KEATS loi 



Thou shalt see the field mouse peep 
Meager from its celled sleep ; 
And the snake all winter-thin 
Cast on sunny bank its skin ; 
Freckled nest eggs thou shalt see 
Hatching in the hawthorn tree, 
When the hen-bird's wing doth rest 
Quiet on her mossy nest ; 
Then the hurry and alarm 
When the beehive casts its swarm ; 
Acorns ripe down-pattering, 
While the autumn breezes sing. 



Oh, sweet Fancy ! let her loose ; 

Everything is spoiled by use : 

Where 's the cheek that doth not fade, 15 

Too much gazed at ? Where 's the maid 

Whose lip mature is ever new ? 

Where 's the eye, however blue. 

Doth not weary ? Where 's the face 

One would meet in every place ? 20 

Where 's the voice, however soft, 

One would hear so very oft ? 

At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth 

Like to bubbles when rain pelteth. 

Let then winged Fancy find 25 

Thee a mistress to thy mind : 

Dulcet-eyed as Ceres' daughter, 

Ere the God of Torment taught her 

How to frown and how to chide ; 

With a waist and with a side 30 

White as Hebe's, when her zone 

Slipped its golden clasp, and down 

Fell her kirde to her feet. 

While she held the goblet sweet, 



I02 SELECTED POEMS 

And Jove grew languid. — Break the mesh 
Of the Fancy's silken leash ; 
Quickly break her prison-string, 
And such joys as these she '11 bring. 
— Let the winged Fancy roam, 
Pleasure never is at home. 



LXXVI 

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN 

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, 

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time. 
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express 

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme : lo 

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape 

Of deities or mortals, or of both, 
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady.? 
What men or gods are these ? What maidens loth ? 

What mad pursuit ? What struggle to escape ? 1 5 

What pipes and timbrels ? What wild ecstasy ? 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 

Are sweeter ; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on ; 
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, 

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone : 20 

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare ; 
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss. 
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve ; 

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 25 

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair ! 

Ah, happy, happy boughs ! that cannot shed 
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu ; 

And, happy melodist, unwearied. 

Forever piping songs forever new ; 30 



KEATS 103 

More happy love ! more happy, happy love ! 
Forever warm and still to be enjoy'd, 
Forever panting, and forever young ; 
All breathing human passion far above, 

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, 5 

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. 

Who are these coming to the sacrifice ? 

To what green altar, O mysterious priest, 
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, 

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? 10 

What little town by river or seashore. 

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel. 
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn ? 
And, little town, thy streets forevermore 

Will silent be ; and not a soul to tell 1 5 

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. 

O Attic shape ! Fair attitude ! with brede 

Of marble men and maidens overwrought. 
With forest branches and the trodden weed ; 

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought 20 

As doth eternity : Cold Pastoral ! 

When old age shall this generation waste. 
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 

" Beauty is truth, truth beauty," — that is all 25 

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 



LXXVII 

THE HUMAN SEASONS 

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year ; 

There are four seasons in the mind of man : 

He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear 

Takes in all beauty with an easy span : 30 



I04 SELECTED POEMS 

He has his Summer, when luxuriously 
Spring's honey'd cud of youthful thought he loves 
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high 
Is nearest unto heaven : quiet coves 

His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings 
He furleth close ; contented so to look 
On mists in idleness — to let fair things 
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook. 

He has his Winter too of pale misfeature, 
Or else he would forego his mortal nature. 



NOTES 

(The notes in brackets are Palgrave's) 

Page 1 Line 1 These stanzas were inspired by Wordsworth's wife 
and composed about two years after his marriage. Wordsworth says, 
however, that " the germ of this poem was four lines composed as a 
part of the verses on the Highland Girl." — Phantom: appearance, 
vision. — 22 machine : compare ''Whilst this machine is to him," 
"Hamlet," II, ii, 1. 124. 

2 1-6 The original impression of the " Phantom of delight " remains, 
and the poet wishes to emphasize it as a final memory. 

2 7 This and the three poems that follow were written while Words- 
worth was in Germany with his sister in 1799. Charles Lamb, writing in 
1 80 1, quoted this poem as being singularly beautiful, and probably all 
readers agree with him. — 8 Dove: the locality is not certainly iden- 
tified. — 11 The violet is the image of her physical beauty, as the star 
is of her spiritual. Both images reenforce the note of solitariness. 

3 5 Palgrave gives the title " The Education of Nature." — 23 state : 
stateliness. — 31 secret : secluded. 

4 22 diurnal : daily. — [Simple as " Lucy Gray" seems, a mere narra- 
tive of what " has been, and may be again," yet every touch in the 
child's picture is marked by the deepest and purest ideal character.] 
Wordsworth notes that this poem was " written at Goslar, Germany. It 
was founded on a circumstance told me by my sister, of a little girl who, 
not far from Halifax in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snowstorm. 
Her footsteps were traced by her parents to the middle of the lock of 
a canal, and no other vestige of her, backwards or forwards, could 
be traced. The body, however, was found in the canal." Observe that 
by omitting this last fact the poet made a tale of mystery out of what 
would otherwise have been only pathetic. 

5 15 minster clock : cathedral clock. — 18 Loosened a bundle of sticks 
and twigs with a lopping tool. — 22 wanton : sportive. 

6 19 This is almost as unadorned a line as Wordsworth ever wrote, 
and the entire poem is as severely simple as poetry can well be. Yet 

105 



io6 SELECTED POEMS 

many capable readers — not all readers — feel it to be one of the most 
moving and truly noble poems ever written by an English poet. To 
appreciate it is to make one's calling and election as a lover of poetry 
about as sure as such an unspectacular consecration can be made. — 
29 In Palgrave this sonnet is entitled " To a Distant Friend." It was 
written in 1835, when Wordsworth was sixty-five years old. He left 
this record of its composition : " In the month of January, when Dora 
and I were walking from Town-end, Grasmere, across the vale, snow 
being upon the ground, she espied, in the thick though leafless hedge, 
a bird's nest half filled with snow. Out of this comfortless appearance 
arose this sonnet, which was, in fact, written without the least reference 
to any individual object, but merely to prove to myself that I could, 
if I thought fit, write in a strain that Poets have been fond of. On 
the 14th of February in the same year, my daughter, in a sportive 
mood, sent it as a Valentine, under a fictitious name, to her cousin 
C[hristopher] \V[ordsworth]." — 32 boon: petition. 

7 11 Palgrave entitled this sonnet " Desideria," which means " Absent 
things longed for." — 13 Thee: Wordsworth's daughter Catharine, who 
died in early childhood. — 14 That spot to which bad fortune can bring 
no harm. — 15 Palgrave has no comma after faithful love. Does his 
punctuation leave the line ambiguous.'' — 25 Daughter of the Voice: echo 
(De Quincey, quoted by Fowler). 

8 8 sense: perhaps nearly equivalent to " intuitions." — 11-12 Many 
readers may prefer another reading of these lines : 

Long may the kindly impulse last ! 

But Thou, if they should totter, teach them to stand fast. 

— 20 Is this better than the reading, "Yet find that other strength, 
according to their need"? 

9 1 uncharter'd : unregulated. The poet perhaps had in mind the 
charters that helped to reduce to order the lawlessness of the Middle 
Ages. — 5-12 This stanza should be carefully studied as an illustration 
of the working of a noble imagination. — 21 Palgrave gives the title, 
"England and Switzerland, 1802." [Switzerland was usurped by the 
French under Napoleon in 1800 ; Venice in 1797 (No. xi)]. — 25 tyrant : 
Napoleon. 

10 7 in fee : as a fief or dependency. See a sketch of the history of 
Venice in some good encyclopedia. — 13-14 A reference to the custom 
of the Doge going out to espouse the Adriatic. — 21 Poets have not 
infrequently bemoaned the condition of their country in terms of 



NOTES 107 

unwarranted severity. Cowper had done it before Wordsworth. Yet, 
on the whole, noble faultfinding is more stimulating than most praise, 
which so often and easily tends to be overbearing and fatuous. And 
Wordsworth apologizes finely in No. xiv. 

11 8 cause : of home and fatherland. — 9 fearful : full of fear lest it 

do wrong. 11 His own account of the London sonnet is interesting : 

" This was written immediately after my return from France to London 
[he refers to a short visit with his sister in 1802], when I could not but 
be struck, as here described, with the vanity and parade of our own 
country, especially in great towns and cities, as contrasted with the 
quiet, and I may say the desolation, that the revolution had produced in 
France. This must be borne in mind, or else the reader may think that 
in this and the succeeding Sonnets I have exaggerated the mischief 
engendered and fostered among us by undisturbed wealth." — 13 pen: 
used with reference to writers and students in general. — 18 manners : 
good habits that make character. 

1211 Cardigan: in Wales. — 13 "This old man had been huntsman 
to the squires of Alfoxden, which, at the time we occupied it, belonged 
to a minor. The old man's cottage stood upon the common, a little 

way from the entrance to Alfoxden Park It is unnecessary to add, 

the fact was as mentioned in the poem ; and I have, after an interval 
of forty-five years, the image of the old man as fresh before my eyes 
as if I had seen him yesterday. The expression when the hounds were 
out, ' I dearly love their voice,' was word for word from his own lips " 
(Wordsworth's note). 

13 5 But oh the heavy change : a possible reminiscence of " Lycidas." 
— 8 Palgrave punctuates this line with a colon and a dash. 

15 9 deeds : the object of reUirning in 1. 10, which participle is con- 
strued with heaHs nnkind, 1. 9.— 10 still : ever. — 13 Palgrave entitled 
this poem " A Lesson." 

16 4 that it was gray: a clause giving the reason for smiled. — 
5 prodigal's: youth and the season of spring. — 6 miser's: age and 
the season of winter. 

17 7 love : a noun or an infinitive ? — 8 Neglect me : did I brood 
over his neglect, or rather, shall I brood now, or some such para- 
phrase seems needed. — 30 Maim'd, mangled: distinguish between 
these words. 

18 3 incommunicable : does it seem likely that such a woman as Mar- 
garet would have used this word ? What do you think she means ? Do 
you notice other places in the poem which seem out of keeping with 



io8 SELECTED POEMS 

what appears to be the general character of the speaker? Wordsworth 
says that the poem was suggested by a poor widow who kept a shop in 
Penrith. " When she saw a stranger passing by, she was in the habit 
of going out into the street to enquire of him after her son." 

19 1 This stanza is omitted in some editions of the poem. Wordsworth 
himself omitted it in all editions between 1827 and 1843. — ^ ^ very 
imaginative line, less obvious in its moral than the last line, and there- 
fore less quoted, though much finer. — 10 more divine: than what.'' — 
13-20 The first stanza describes the little orchard in the garden of 
Dove Cottage. Dorothy Wordsworth's journals record several descrip- 
tions that might have served as rough studies for the poem. — 30 para- 
mours : lovers. Notice how the other elements in the scene are made 
to serve as background for the linnet, which embodies the spirit of the 
whole. 

20 15 This is most probably the best line of the poem. It is hard to 
believe that the harsh opinion of his critics almost persuaded Words- 
worth to discard it. — 22 [This poem has an exaltation and a glory, 
joined with an exquisiteness of expression, which place it in the 
highest rank among the many masterpieces of its illustrious author.] 
The poem beautifully describes the service which Wordsworth believed 
the memory of natural objects could render. Here the memory of his 
boyhood, suggested by the bird, makes the world about him seem once 
more an enchanted place. 

21 25 This great sonnet, Wordsworth tells us, was written on the 
roof of a coach, on his way to France with his sister. Her account of 
the scene is in her journal : " We left London on Saturday morning at 
half-past five or six. . . . We mounted the Dover coach at Charing 
Cross. It was a beautiful morning. The city, St. Paul's, with the river, 
and a multitude of little boats, made a most beautiful sight as we crossed 
Westminster Bridge. The houses were not overhung by their cloud of 
smoke, and they spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly, 
with such a fierce light, that there was even something like the purity 
of one of nature's own grand spectacles." It is interesting to compare 
these descriptions, to see what it was that the poet observed and his 
sister missed. Or is the difference only in the statement ? 

22 11 The person referred to, Wordsworth notes, was the then Duke 
of Queensbury. The fact was told Wordsworth by Walter Scott. 
Dorothy accompanied her brother on the tour in Scotland during 
which this poem was written. Her account again offers material for 
an interesting comparison : " After breakfast walked up the river to 



NOTES 109 

Neidpath Castle, about a mile and a half from the town. The castle 
stands upon a green hill, overlooking the Tweed, a strong square- 
towered edifice, neglected and desolate, though not in ruin, the garden 
overgrown with grass, and the high walls that fenced it broken down. 
The Tweed winds between green steeps, upon which, and close to the 
river-side, large flocks of sheep pasturing; higher still are the grey 
mountains ; but I need not describe the scene, for William has done it 
better than I coud do in a sonnet which he wrote the same day ; the 
last five Hnes, at least, of his poem will impart to you more of the feel- 
ing of the place than it would be possible for me to do." 

23 1 Palgrave gives another version of this hne : " Yes, there is holy 
pleasure in thine eye." The sonnet was written as a warning for tour- 
ists who were too ready to settle in the Lake Country, but not at all 
ready to follow a simple Ufe. In the " Golden Treasury " the title is 
"Admonition to a Traveler." — 15 This poem was written not long 
after Wordsworth returned from Scotland. The girl was one of two 
sisters, whom Dorothy describes at length in her journal : " At this day 
the innocent merriment of the girls, with their kindness to us, and the 
beautiful figure and face of the elder, come to my mind whenever I 
think of the ferry-house and waterfall of Loch Lomond, and I never 
think of the two girls but the whole image of that romantic spot is 
before me, a living image, as it will be to my dying day." 

24(3 peers: those of equal station. — 27 Dorothy Wordsworth says : 
" I think I never heard the English language sound more sweetly than 
from the mouth of the elder of these girls, while she stood at the gate 
answering our inquiries, her face flushed with the rain ; her pronuncia- 
tion was clear and distinct ; without difficulty, yet slow, like that of a 
foreign speech." 

26 18 Wordsworth's doctrine of memory is here finely illustrated. 
26 1 This poem, no less realistic than the preceding, was founded 
on actual experience only in part, as the following note by Dorothy 
Wordsworth shows : " It was harvest-time, and the fields were quietly 
— might I be allowed to say pensively ? — enlivened by small com- 
panies of reapers. It is not uncommon in the more lonely parts of the 
Highlands to see a single person so employed. The following poem 
[' The Solitary Reaper '] was suggested to William by a beautiful sen- 
tence in Thomas Wilkinson's Tour in Scotland:' Wilkinson's " Tours 
to the British Mountains " was not pubhshed till 1824, but he made his 
journey to Scotland in 1787, and he lent the manuscript of his journal 
to his friend Wordsworth. Professor Knight quotes the sentence that 



no SELECTED POEMS 

inspired Wordsworth, and that furnished the last line of the poem : 
" Passed a female who was reaping alone ; she sung in Erse, as she 
bended over her sickle ; the sweetest human voice I ever heard ; her 
strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were 
heard no more." — 17-20 It would be hard to give a happier description 
of romantic poetry, such as Scott loved and wrote ; in the remainder 
of the stanza the description is equally happy of the kind of poetry 
Wordsworth excelled in. 

27 8 Cheapside : for these streets see Baedeker's " London." — IG This 
poem is sometimes criticized as coming close to being doggerel. Such 
critics, it is to be presumed, put too much sing-song into their reading 
of it. It can be so read as to produce admirable rhythmical effects, 
and its pathos is of a high though simple order. In other words, 
when read by the eye alone or when poorly read aloud, the stanzas will 
disappoint, and why not? — 17 In the "Golden Treasury" this poem 
has the title by which it is usually known, " The Daffodils." 

28 9-10 These lines were supplied to the poet by his wife. They are 
the best description of his doctrine of memory. — 21 dappled : spotted, 
variegated, with the daisies. 

291 port: bearing. — 9 Cyclops: see a classical dictionary and the 
Odyssey. — 25 Bright Flower: Palgrave reads " Sweet Flower." Words- 
worth substituted bright to avoid the repetition of sxveet in 1. 28. 

30 1 [This lovely poem refers here and there to a ballad by Hamilton 
on the subject.] — 6 Marrow: mate, companion, — his sister, Dorothy 
Wordsworth. — 8 Braes: slopes. — 17 Leader Haughs : the meadows 
along the river Leader. — 19 Dryburgh : the seat of the abbey. — 
20 lintwhites : Hnnets. — 21 Tiviot-dale : also Teviot. 

31 1 holms : alluvial fields. — 5 strath : valley. 

32 1 Of this poem Charles Lamb made the following criticism in a 
letter to Wordsworth : " I meant to mention ' Yarrow Visited,' with 
that stanza, ' But thou that didst appear so fair,' than which I think no 
lovelier stanza can be found in the wide world of poetry; — yet the 
poem, on the whole, seems condemned to leave behind it a melancholy 
of imperfect satisfaction, as if you had wronged the feeling with which, 
in what preceded it, you had resolved never to visit it, and as if the 
Muse had determined, in the most delicate manner, to make you, and 
scarce make you, feel it. Else it is far superior to the other, which has 
but one exquisite verse in it, the last but one, or the last two ; this is 
all fine, except, perhaps, that that of ' studious ease and generous cares ' 
has a little tinge of the less roniantic about it." Wordsworth took Lamb's 



NOTES III 

criticism seriously. See note below to p. 33, 1. 30. — 25 the famous Flower : 
see Nos. clxiii and clxiv of the " Golden Treasury." 

33 9-16 Do you agree with Lamb's praise of this stanza? — 30 This 
and the two following lines originally read : 

It promises protection 
To studious ease, and generous cares 
And every chaste affection. 

34 23 In the " Golden Treasury " this sonnet is called " By the Sea." 
Dorothy Wordsworth describes several evenings at Calais, when she 
and her brother made their visit to France in 1S02. 

35 4 Abraham's bosom: see Luke xvi, 22. — 7 This poem should be 
compared with Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet, " Sleep," No. XL in the 
"Golden Treasury." — 21 This sonnet is entitled by Palgrave "The 
Inner Vision." 

36 7 "Actually composed while I was sitting by the side of the brook 
that runs down from the Comb, in which stands the village of Alford, 
through the grounds of Alfoxden " (Wordsworth's note). 

37 5 This poem shows nature's influence in the formation of an 
evil character, as No. iv shows her power to train a noble soul. — 
26 Cherokees : the student need not be surprised that, although he was 
an Englishman, Wordsworth selected the name of a tribe of Indians 
who were really found in the southern states. He had read such 
books as William Bartram's " Travels," and had caught from them 
some notions of the beauty of semitropical nature. 

38 22-25 Compare Othello's wooing of Desdemona. 

3911 savannahs: meadows (Spanish). Compare the name of the 
Georgia city. 

40 5 sylvan: forest. — 22-30 Do these lines represent the prosaic 
Wordsworth.^ — 30 West: is Wordsworth's geography becoming hazy .? 

43 8-10 These lines seem labored when compared with the following 
more appropriate close of the stanza : 

And there she sang tumultuous songs, 
By recollection of her wrongs 
To fearful passion roused. 

— 15 clear : this once read xvild. — 21 it liked her : note the archaic 
touch. — 26 Tone: a small river in Somersetshire, near the Quantock 
Hills (see p. 44, 1. 24). — 29 engines: Wordsworth seems to assume 
that Ruth had as philosophic an insight into the effects of free nature 
as had the thoughtful, but in this case rather fantastic, poet. 



112 SELECTED POEMS 

45 5 [Written soon after the death by shipwreck, of Wordsworth's 
brother John] ; see p. 46, 1. 16. [This poem may be profitably compared 
with Shelley's, following it.] " On a poet's lips," p. 86. [Each is the 
most complete expression of the innermost spirit of his art given by 
these great poets, — of that Idea which, as in the case of the true 
painter (to quote the words of Reynolds), "subsists only in the mind; 
the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it; it is an idea' 
residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always laboring to 
impart, and which he dies at last without imparting."] Sir George 
Beaumont of Coleorton Hall was a cultivated friend of Wordsworth's. 
Peele Castle is " a ruined keep on a small island close to the modern 
town of Barrow, in Furness, Lancashire" (Fowler). — 19-20 One of the 
most famous passages in Wordsworth's poetry. 

46 27 hulk : dismantled vessel. 

47 2 [the Kind : the human race.] — 10 Ossian : the ancient Gaelic 
poet. Dorothy Wordsworth thus describes the scene of this poem : 
" It is truly a solitude, the road even making it appear more so : the 
bottom of the valley is mostly smooth and level, the brook not noisy : 
everything is simple and undisturbed, and while we passed through it 
the whole place was shady, cool, clear, and solemn. At the end of the 
long valley we ascended a hill to a great height, and reached the top, 
where the sun, on the point of setting, shed a soft yellow light upon 
every eminence. The prospect was very extensive ; over hollows and 
plains, no towns, and few houses visible — a prospect, extensive as it 
was, in harmony with the secluded dell, and fixing its own peculiar 
character of removedness from the world, and the secure possession of 
the quiet of nature more deeply in our minds." Wordsworth wrote the 
poem on hearing of the tradition relating to the glen, which he did not 
know when he was there. 

48 23 Proteus : the old man of the sea in Grecian mythology, who 
kept Amphitrite's seals, and could change himself into any form, — 
whence the adjective " protean." — 24 Triton : the trumpeter who raised 
or calmed the waves. Compare Spenser's lines in " Colin Clout 's Come 
Home Againe " : 

Of them the shepheard which hath charge in chief, 
Is Triton blowing loud his wreathed home. 

— 25 [royal Saint: Henry VI.] — 28 white-robed: wearing surplices. 

49 4 sense: of beauty. — 11 "This and other poems connected with 
Matthew would not gain by a literal detail of facts. Like the Wanderer 



NOTES 113 

in ' The Excursion,' this Schoolmaster was made up of several both 
of his class and men of other occupations " (Wordsworth's note). 

50 13 sued : does this mean wooed, courted, or followed ? 

51 7 This is the fine passage of the poem. Can you feel the pathos 
and the truth of this line ? — 23 catch : snatch. 

53 21 Do you like the way the poem ends ? Why did not the poet 
stop with 1. 20? — 25 Trosachs : a mountain pass in Perthshire, Scot- 
land. Wordsworth notes that he first saw the Trosachs in 1803, in his 
sister's company ; he saw them again just before Scott went abroad 
in a last effort to regain his health ; the poem, he says, was " colored 
by the remembrance of my recent visit to Sir Walter Scott, and the 
melancholy errand on which he was going." 

54 5 Palgrave punctuates with a colon and dash after zipon. — 20 The 
fundamental idea of this great ode is Platonic. Wordsworth held it 
only in a poetic sense. It is worth while to compare the poem that may 
have suggested it — Henry Vaughan's "The Retreat" ("The Golden 
Treasury," No. xcviii) : 

Happy those early days, when I 
Shined in my Angel-infancy ! 
Before I understood this place 
Appointed for my second race, 
Or taught my soul to fancy aught 
But a white, celestial thought ; 
When yet I had not walk'd above 
A mile or two from my first Love, 
And looking back, at that short space 
Could see a glimpse of His bright face ; 
When on some gilded cloud or flower 
My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
And in those weaker glories spy 
Some shadows of eternity ; 
Before I taught my tongue to wound 
My conscience with a sinful sound, 
Or had the black art to dispense 
A several sin to every sense, 
But felt through all this fleshly dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness. 

O how I long to travel back, 
And tread again that ancient track ! 
That I might once more reach that plain 
Where first I left my glorious train ; 



114 SELECTED POEMS 

From whence th' enlighten'd spirit sees 
That shady City of palm trees ! 
But ah ! my soul with too much stay 
Is drunk, and staggers in the way : — 
Some men a forward motion love, 
But I by backward steps would move ; 
And when this dust falls to the urn, 
In that state I came, return. 

55 16 tabor : a small drum. — 29 Palgrave omits the comma at the end 
of this line. 

56 2 coronal: wreath. Do you like the cadence of this Hne .? — 
10, 22 Palgrave omits the commas at the ends of these lines. 

57 11 the Child : Hartley Coleridge. There are lines in this stanza 
which to some readers come near to being doggerel. Despite the truth 
to nature of the description, the poet's style seems to drop distressingly 
far below the splendid level maintained in the stanzas that precede and 
follow. Lines 14-15 are unamenable to this criticism; but in contrast 
see 11. 32-33. 

58 32 " I was often unable to think of external things as having 
external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something 
not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times 
while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself 
from this abyss of idealism to the reality" (Wordsworth's note). 

59 17-23 A splendid illustration of Wordsworth's imagination at its 
height, — the power of seeing and making others see "the light that 
never was on sea or land." 

60 7-23 These lines are both nobly calm and piercingly pathetic. 
Which seems in excess, the calm or the pathos ? — 11 This line Pal- 
grave punctuates with a colon, and the following line with a semicolon. 

61 1 The first lines of this poem are all that the average reader 
knows of it, but the whole piece is remarkable for the vehemence of 
passion and the rapidity of the images. Notice how quickly the theme 
is explained, the scene set, and the lover brought to the chamber 
window. — 6 Do you like this daring image ? — 9 In this and several 
other passages in Shelley, the punctuation used by Palgrave has been 
abandoned and that of the best texts substituted, wherever that substi- 
tution is in accord with American usage. — 11 champac : an Indian 
flower of the magnolia type. — 21, 23 These Hnes are longer than the 
corresponding lines of the preceding stanzas. Notice the swelling effect 
that the change gives to the end of the poem. 



NOTES 115 

62 8 thine: heart or devotion? — 9 Could you make a comparison 
between the simple, conversational tone of this poem, especially 11. 15 
and 23, and, the poetic style that Wordsworth believed in ? 

631 o'er: Palgrave reads over. — 11 her: compare his^ 1. 19. — 
19 Where do you place the four accents of this line ? — 22 To be read 
thus : " Thy brother Death came, and cried." 

64 5 In the " Golden Treasury " this poem is called " The Flight of 
Love." — 23 singled: Fowler thinks that this means "left single," "left 
alone," rather than " selected," " picked out." Is this explanation too 
subtle 'i — 24 An obscure line. Perhaps the sense is that, after love has 
first left its well-built nest in an unstable heart, then that heart is left 
to endure the person it has once loved, or else the fact that it has 
loved and proved inconstant. — 27 the frailest: Fowler explains this 
as meaning " the human heart." Perhaps it means the singer himself. 

65 2 eagle: lofty. — 5 One word: love. — 7-8 The meaning is that 
any one is false who disdains love ; therefore the lady, who is not false, 
cannot disdain it. — 12 that : Fowler says that here that " must mean 
love." But must it? It may not be very great poetry which Shelley 
gives us if that stands iox pity ; but even Shelley may have ended a 
stanza in a weak fashion, and even he is not exempt from obedience to 
the rules of grammar. — 14, 16 What do you think of these rimes ? 

66 13 The sage : it is not clear what special sage, if any, Shelley had 
in mind. — 26 Compare the manner of Shelley's death. A fifth stanza 
has been omitted from the poem as it was originally written in Decem- 
ber, 18 18. Note that if each of the first eight lines had an additional 
foot, this poem would be in Spenserian stanzas. — 28 Mrs. Shelley 
describes the scene of this famous poem : " In the spring [1820] we 
spent a week or two near Leghorn, borrowing the house of some 
friends, who were absent on a journey to England. It was on a beauti- 
ful summer evening while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle 
hedges were the bowers of the fireflies, that we heard the carolling of 
the skylark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems." 

67 10 unbodied : disembodied. 

68 14 What color does the description suggest ? 

69 1 hymeneal : relating to marriage. — 10 With this line the poet 
begins to take possession of the poem, — to think of himself rather 
than of the bird. 

70 1 measures : musical strains. — 11 This sonnet is probably due 
more or less to Shelley's own invention. — 25 The guitar here cele- 
brated is preserved in the Bodleian library, Oxford. Trelawny describes 



ii6 SELECTED POEMS 

the poet in the act of writing these verses : " The strong light streamed 
through the opening of the trees. One of the pines, undermined by 
the water, had fallen into it. Under its lee, and nearly hidden, sat the 
Poet, gazing on the dark mirror beneath, so lost in his bardish reverie 
that he did not hear my approach. . . . The day I found Shelley in the 
pine-forest he was writing verses on a guitar." — Ariel to Miranda: see 
Shakespeare's " The Tempest." 

71 20 [interlunar swoon : interval of the moon's invisibility.] Com- 
pare Milton, " Samson Agonistes," 11. 87-89 : 

Silent as the Moon, 

When she deserts the night, 

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. 

73 15 This poem is not given in its complete form. — 17-18 Note the 
influence of Milton's " L' Allegro." — 23 halcyon: calm. See a classical 
dictionary under " Alcyone." 

74 19 dun : dark. — 24 never sets : blooms at all seasons. 

75 2 thou : Shelley's friend, Mrs. Jane Williams, to whom the two 
preceding poems were addressed. 

76 7 With : Fowler notes that Palgrave follows W. M. Rossetti's 
edition, other editions reading by. 

77 21 This poem should be compared with Sidney's sonnet to the 
moon. No. lviii in the "Golden Treasury." — 27 In the "Golden 
Treasury " this poem is called " A Dream of the Unknown." 

78 2 copse : thicket. — 5 pied : variegated. — 6 [Arcturi : seemingly 
used for northern stars^ — 6-7 Compare p. 74, 1. 24. — 9 tall flower: 
what flower did Shelley mean? — 17 [And wild roses: our language has 
perhaps no line modulated with more subtle sweetness.] — 22 prank'd : 
adorned, decked. 

79 1 Kept : the subject is children ; the objects are hties and aiTay. 
Would a comma after array help the awkward passage 1 — 5 [The 
leading idea of this beautiful description of a day's landscape in Italy 
appears to be : On the voyage of life are many moments of pleasure, 
given by the sight of nature, who has power to heal even the world- 
liness and the uncharity of man]. The poem has been shortened. — 
18 drank : strictly the preterite form. 

80 3 Euganean : hills between Padua and Verona. — 4 paean : choral 
song addressed to Apollo. — 13 grain: dye or color. — 30 [Amphitrite : 
daughter to Ocean.] 

81 2 As : as if. — 17 watery bier : a phrase used by Milton in 



NOTES 117 

" Lycidas." — 20 slave of slaves: Napoleon, — a moral rather than 
historical judgment. 

821 mask: dance. — 7 air-dissolved: dissolved into air, whatever 
that phenomenon may be. — 10 profound: depth. — 20 dun: dark. — 
24 ollve-sandal'd : the reference is to the olive trees lining the foot of 
the mountains. 

8411 interval: object of supplies, two lines below. — 19 it: the 
" healing paradise " of 1. 4. Are they the " Spirits " of 1. 2 or the 
" polluting multitude " of 1. 5 ? 

85 12 [Maenad : a frenzied nymph, attendant on Dionysus in the 
Greek mythology. May we not call this the most vivid, sustained, and 
impassioned amongst all Shelley's magical personifications of nature ?] 
— 23 Baiae's bay : a resort of the Romans at the western end of the 
Bay of Naples. — 30-33 [Plants under water sympathize with the seasons 
of the land, and hence with the winds which affect them.] 

86 1 The poet takes possession of the poem, as he had done in the 
ode '' To the Skylark." Notice the steps by which he identifies himself 
with the west wind. — 29 Palgrave entitles this poem "The Poet's 
Dream." It is a passage from " Prometheus Unbound," I, i. — 30 love- 
adept : one versed in love. 

87 5 create he can: he can create. — 10 cloud: thundercloud. — 
13 stain : almost meaningless. Shelley probably meant to write strain. 
— 16 In the " Golden Treasury " this poem is called " Threnos." 

88 1 Notice the musical quality, the " song " quality, of this beauti- 
ful poem, which Palgrave appropriately made an epilogue to his great 
collection of lyrics. 

89 1 In the " Golden Treasury " this poem is called " Ode on the 
Poets." Keats wrote it on the blank page before Beaumont and 
Fletcher's tragi-comedy, "The Fair Maid of the Inn." — 8 parle : 
speech. — 13 tented: covered, as with tents, by the flowers. — 18 tranced: 
it would be pleasant to think that Keats thought of the nightingale as 
enchanted with its own sweet song, but the use of senseless makes one 
think he may have meant to emphasize the bird's lack of feeling. — 
20 numbers : verses. 

90 4 Never slumbering (put to sleep) or satiated. — 17 realms of gold: 
of great books, chiefly of poetry. — 22 demesne: sovereign estate. — 
24 Chapman, George (i 557-1634), the Elizabethan dramatist and trans- 
lator. — 27 [stout Cortez : history would here suggest Balboa (A.T.). It 
may be noticed that to find in Chapman's Homer the " pure serene " 
of the original, the reader must bring with him the imagination of the 



ii8 SELECTED POEMS 

youthful poet ; he must be " a Greek himself," as Shelley finely said of 
Keats.] ("A. T." means Alfred Tennyson collaborating with Palgrave.) 

91 1 In the " Golden Treasury " this poem is called " Happy In- 
sensibility," Palgrave noting that in "this and in other instances the 
addition (or the change) of a title " had been " risked, in hope that 
the aim of the piece following " might " be grasped more clearly and 
immediately." — li fretting: is this word used in a physical (= ruffling) 
or in a metaphysical sense ? — 20 Writhed : supply loho. — 25 The 
title, which is that of an old French poem written by Alain Chartier, 
means " the beautiful lady without compassion." Keats owed little or 
nothing to any preceding poem. — 26 palely : a questionable use of the 
adverb in place of the adjective, yet the poetic effect is striking. 

92 15 as : as if. — 17-20 Notice the picture. What is the effect of 
mounting her on the steed? — 28 kisses four: the use of a specific 
number is a trick imitated from the old English ballads, but the num- 
ber four rarely occurs in folk poetry; the usual numbers are three and 
seven. In a letter to his brother, April 28, 1819, Keats comments 
humorously : " I was obliged to chose an even number, that both eyes 
might have fair play, and to speak truly I think two apiece quite suffi- 
cient. Suppose I had said seven ; there would have been three and a half 
apiece — a very awkward affair." — 31 latest : very last, the dream from 
which he only half awoke. 

93 5 gloam : is this noun often used .'' — gaped : is this a verb or a 
participle ? — 13 [This beautiful sonnet was the last word of a youth, in 
whom, if the fulfillment may ever safely be prophesied from the prom- 
ise, England lost one of the most rarely gifted in the long roll of her 
poets. Shakespeare and Milton, had their lives been closed at twenty- 
five, would (so far as we know) have left poems of less excellence and 
hope than the youth who, from the petty school and the London sur- 
gery, passed at once to a place with them of " high collateral glory."] 
Notice how the grand and cold images in the first eight lines ennoble 
the emotion of the last six. — 16 Eremite : hermit. 

94 1 In the " Golden Treasury " this sonnet is called " The Terror 
of Death." — 3 charact'ry : printed characters. — 6 romance: that of 
creation, of the wonders of the infinite universe. — 8 magic hand of 
chance : inspiration. — 18 [The Mermaid was the clubhouse of Shake- 
speare, Ben Jonson, and other choice spirits of that age.] — 24 Robin 
Hood: see " Ivanhoe." — 26 bowse: booze, drink heavily. 

95 8 Zodiac : " An imaginary belt encircling the heavens . . . within 
which are the larger planets. It is divided into twelve parts, called 



NOTES 119 

signs of the Zodiac, which formerly corresponded to twelve constella- 
tions bearing the same name" (The Students' Standard Dictionary). 
See some almanac. Are the poets in the Zodiac, or is the Mermaid 
there, as a new constellation, or are both there.-* — 13 ''The death of 
his brother wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour 
he began to droop. He wrote his exquisite 'Ode to the Nightingale' at 
this time, and as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows 
he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous 
undertone which affected me deeply " (Haydon, in his correspondence). 
— 1() Lethe-wards : toward the river of forgetfulness. — 19 Dryad: see 
a classical dictionary. — 25 Flora: the Roman goddess of flowers. — 
2G Provengal song : the poetry of the troubadours of Provence, in the 
south of France. — 28 Hippocrene : the spring of the Muses on Mt. 
Helicon. — 29 winking: hard to render in prose; sparkling gleefully, 
perhaps. 

96 12 pards : tigers or lynxes that drew the wine-god's chariot. — 
31 Darkling : hidden in the dark. 

97 12 See the Bible, the " Book of Ruth." — 27 Compare "Paradise 
Lost," IX, 445 : 

As one who long in populous city pent. 

98 3 debonair : perhaps this means here charming rather than ele- 
gant. — 11 Keats wrote from Winchester, September 22, 1819, "How 
beautiful the season is now. How fine the air — a temperate sharpness 
about it. . . . I never liked stubble-fields so much as now — aye, better 
than the chilly green of the Spring. Somehow, a stubble plain looks 
warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me 
so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it." 

99 6 barred clouds: that suggest bars (probably). — bloom: reflect the 
rosy glow of, or give a glowing quality to. — 9 river sallows : willows 
by the river. — 11 hilly bourn : boundary of hills. — 13 garden croft : 
inclosure that serves as a garden. — 15 In the "Golden Treasury" 
this poem is called "The Realm of Fancy." — 19, 20 The rimes sug- 
gest the remark that editors who are eloquently censorious with re- 
gard to the faulty rimes of Byron and Campbell accept those of Keats 
and Shelley with a gaping gratitude of silence. — 30 ingle : fireplace. 

100 3 shoon : old plural of shoes. — 33 Shaded : that has grown up 
in the shade (probably). 

101 27 [Ceres' daughter : Proserpine.] —28 [God of Torment : Pluto.] 
— 31 Hebe: see a classical dictionary. — 33 kirtle: a garment with a skirt. 



i20 SELECTED POEMS 

102 6 The comparison of this poem with " L'Allegro " is inevitable. 
Despite the wealth of beauty lavished by the romantic poet, the student 
will do well to note the superiority of the more restrained poet, who is 
the supreme English representative of classical art. — 7 [Every one 
knows the general story of the Italian Renaissance, of the revival of 
letters. From Petrarch's day to our own, that ancient world has re- 
newed its youth ; poets and artists, students and thinkers, have yielded 
themselves wholly to its fascination, and deeply penetrated its spirit. 
Yet perhaps no one more truly has vivified, whilst idealizing, the pic- 
ture of Greek country life in the fancied Golden Age, than Keats 
in these lovely (if somewhat unequally executed) stanzas ; his quick 
imagination, by a kind of " natural magic," more than supplying 
the scholarship which his youth had no opportunity of gaining.] — 
13 Tempe : the famous vale in Thessaly. — Arcady : in the Pelopon- 
nesus, famous for pastoral life. — 16 timbrels : tambourines. — 19 sen- 
sual : not used with an unpleasant connotation. 

103 4 passion: object of above. — 13 [this folk: its has been here 
plausibly, but perhaps unnecessarily, conjectured.] 



